Inquiry-based Science Education

First, good news!

The science jobs are opening up right and left. I have a phone interview at a fancy magnet school in Hartford and an in-person interview at another nice school in Hartford on Thursday morning. I’ve officially taken my phone off silent for the week.

Today, for the first time in six weeks, I was allowed to direct my own learning. I was given a packet on inquiry-based science, and given 10 minutes to read it, keeping in mind our goal of designing a classroom vision. I thanked the instructor for letting us work independently, and he said with a smirk, “You are adults.”

While I love the ideas raised by the packet we read, I would prefer to call it “inquiry-based science education”. Inquiry-based science is redundant. Science is inquiry-based. Science, by definition, is a standardized form of inquiry. The scientific method is everything. It tells us how to inquire, in a standard way such that our results are then trustworthy (ideally).

Inquiry is evaluating, exploring, questioning, doing, processing, analyzing, and investigating.

This is important for our vision and goal because it is the way science works in the real world. It holds kids accountable for their learning. It promotes learning, making knowledge more “sticky”. It teaches skills like critical thinking. It provides opportunity to learn from mistakes. It allows students to become scientists.

We need to teach kids that there isn’t necessarily one right answer. There may be two answers. There may be none. My mentor at Brown always emphasized that experiments that don’t work give us more interesting opportunities, because we can learn something we didn’t initially plan on learning.

To quote a TFA ’09 CM, “I’m not gonna teach you stuff, I’m gonna teach you how to figure out stuff.”

Unfortunately, though, there are also standardized tests. We also have to teach them how to successfully regurgitate material in addition to teaching them how to inquire. And we have to do all of this in one school year.

So, we have to prioritize what’s most important for our kids to learn and know. We need to “spiral” in scientific inquiry, incorporating higher level skills into each unit until we end the school year with a classroom full of scientists.

The big challenge will be teaching them how to think.