The Inquiry Project

From 2010 – 2017, I was a part of the Elementary Connected Classrooms (ECC) project. The ECC engaged students by leading them through a year long inquiry project. We originally based our inquiry project unit on the works of Dr. Kieran Egan from Simon Fraser University.

I’ve written several blog posts on the ECC blog, over the past several years documenting this project:

Inquiry Topics Motivate Discussion

What’s Your Inquiry Ms G?

Inquiring About the Inquiry Project

Also, here’s the link to the google doc we originally used to collaboratively plan the inquiry project. It’s definitely grown and changed depending on the teachers involved in the project, and, more importantly, the kids in our classrooms.

In my final year with the ECC, I played with including the idea of advocacy into the end of the year. Even though the inquiry project had been a successful piece of the ECC for years, it had always seemed like there was something missing from the inquiry project. After hearing the stories shared by a group that attended High Tech High in the fall of 2015, I realized that the piece that had been missing was the advocacy piece. That was the part of their stories from their travels to High Tech High that really resonated with me. For example, Suzy studied and learned about elephants all year. She is the elephant expert in the class. But so what? What can she do with all that knowledge? If she cares about elephants enough to learn about them all year long, shouldn’t she finish off the year by doing something positive with all that knowledge she has? Perhaps maybe finding a way to raise funds to donate to initiatives to help save elephant habitat?