Structured Inuiry

Inquiry-based design is a foundation to my instruction so when I learned that we were going to complete structured inquiry lesson I felt well within my comfort zone. The lesson that I chose to do was on developing a class definition for living things. Students had to use various local living and non-living objects to develop the characteristics of life. Then as a class we developed a complete definition with all of the characteristics of life using the active board. The students then used this definition to identify unknown objects as living or non-living and had to prove their answer using the definition. Students then had to answer an some summary questions using the student response systems and the active board. The students and myself love this lesson because it really challenges our preconceived notions of what is alive and forces us to breakdown some barriers that we have concerning the living things. For instance, most students try to compare everything to a human and run into some complications in correctly identifying living things. This lesson allowed student to take an active role in the development of material for the class and also gave the students a sense of ownership over the material. Even after the lesson students during class would ask well is this object alive and before I could answer the class said OK lets go through the definition. As I stood back and merely guided them they identifying the object all on their own. This showed to me student proficiency and the success of inquiry-based design in instruction.