Growing Inquiry

teaching context

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I have been a high school English and history/geography teacher since 2010, beginning in the United States and continuing in Australia since 2012.  As a Social Studies major in university, I was constantly prompted to ask questions and to consider history, geography and political thought from varying points of view.  I brought this philosophy into my teaching, and research and personal discovery has been essential to helping my students consider big questions and dig deeper in research assignments.  As my school provided one-to-one laptops to students, I have been able to assign more research-rich tasks and teach smart research skills.  I have always struggled, however, to balance content requirements and behavioural issues with my desire to allow students time to dig into sources and to guide their own learning process.

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current understanding of inquiry learning

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As I work towards becoming a teacher-librarian, I have been challenged to develop my use of inquiry learning.  My first step was to see what answers a Google search would provide. 

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I was actually surprised to find that there were over a million results on the subject, and that others were asking the same questions I was:

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Not only were there prompts for what 'people also ask,' but the pages that Google directed me to first were ones that either defined and explained what inquiry learning is, or attempted to teach people how to fascilitate it.

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After reading and drawing upon my previous understanding, I know that inquiry learning is student led--instead of the teacher selecting and teaching content, students develop questions they are interested in and use research tools and teacher mentoring to answer those questions.  Students can change and adapt their questions as they research, creating more questions as they learn, deepening their understanding of a chosen topic over time.  Unlike traditional direct instruction, teachers using inquiry learning seek to offer students the tools, scaffolding and mentoring to direct their learning, believing students will become more excited about their findings as a result. 

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what I want to know

 

While some subjects (like history, geography and science) suit inquirly learning well, others (like English and maths) have still not been heavily influenced by it.  As an English teacher, I would like to know how inquiry learning can be used in English as a subject, specifically in teaching literature and reading skills.  I would like to know how subjects that do not naturally lend themselves to using an inquiry approach can use discovery and research as a way to enhance learning and engage students in the subjects.  My top three questions are:

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1. How can high school teachers use inquiry learning to engage
students in reading and English?

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2. How can inquiry learning be used to teach literature
and reading for pleasure?

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3. In what ways does an inquiry approach to teaching English
and literature improve student engagement and rigour?

 

I know I want to find out how to use an inquiry approach successfully in my English and literature classes where teachers don't often seem to encourage inquiry learning, but I'm not sure of how these questions will change over the course of my research and discovery.

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