Inquiry in a Modern Classroom

We're often asked whether Modern Classrooms support inquiry-based learning. In fact, they're perfect for it! Read on to learn why.

Most people don’t know this, but part of the reason I co-founded the Modern Classrooms Project was to support educators with inquiry-based teaching and learning.

We don’t talk a lot about curriculum at Modern Classrooms, because we believe that our model works for any curriculum, anywhere – whether it’s based on inquiry or not.  We want you to feel supported whatever curriculum you use.

If you happen to use inquiry, however, I think you’re in luck.  Personally, I am a strong believer in learning through inquiry... in fact, I built my own Modern Classroom specifically to facilitate it!  Here's how it worked:

1) I began every lesson with an inquiry task. This was an interesting and unfamiliar problem designed to engage my students and develop their problem-solving skills. Students tackled these tasks, independently or in groups, before watching my videos.

2) In my videos, I introduced new content by applying it to the tasks that students had just completed. By the time they reached any instructional video, therefore, my students had already grappled with a task involving the skills my video would present – and they knew, therefore, what understanding the video’s skills would help them do.  

3) Once students had watched my video, and practiced the skill itself, they would demonstrate mastery by completing a problem similar to the inquiry task.  This time, they had the skills to solve it!  Being able to solve previously unfamiliar problems built students' confidence and self-esteem.

To summarize: an inquiry task motivated each video, and each video explained a task. Letting students move at their own paces, and requiring students to achieve mastery, built the skills and habits that students needed to engage with progressively more complex inquiry tasks.

This all (I hope) sounds pretty good!  But how did it actually work?  To show you -- and to give you a look inside my own Modern Classroom -- I've created a step-by-step explanation, with videos and examples, of my own approach to inquiry-based learning.  Whether you use inquiry in your classroom or not, I hope you'll find something here that's useful!

Are you using inquiry in your own Modern Classroom?  Let us know on Twitter, or join our Facebook Group and tell us more!