Inquiry:
Engaging students in
deeper learning
Laurie Stowell
San Marcos Writing Project
Quickwrite:
Why are you teaching? What
got you into teaching? What are
you passionate about? What do
you look forward to everyday
when you head out to your
classroom?
Rank the discussions:
Read the four short transcripts
(assuming they are
representative of much longer
discussions): A, B, C, D and rank
them: 1) best example of a class
discussion to 4) worst . Be
prepared to explain your
reasoning.
What are good discussions?
 What are the standards for good
classroom discussion?
 What are the most powerful purposes
and outcomes of good classroom
discussion?
 What are the qualities that mark good
classroom discussions?
 What should be the students’ role and the
teachers’ role in a good classroom discussion?
 What moves should a teacher make to facilitate
good classroom discussion? What moves
should the students be making?
 What does a good discussion look, sound and
feel like to participants? To observers?
What are effective
discussions and how
can we help students
get that into their
writing?
“Writing floats on a
sea of talk.”
-James Briton
Inquiry oriented discussions:
 Build off a big, initial question that provides a clear
purpose: the big question declares the problem or task
to be tackled.
 Generate new, compelling open-ended questions that
are posed and pursued by both teachers and students
 Invite exploration: students play around and take
risks as they pursue answers to the big idea
 Encourage students to feel free to put forth tentative
theories
 Allow students to do the work and do it together.
Many students talk.
 Focus on compelling ideas and significant processesnot just on getting a single correct answer.
 Entertain various perspectives and cultivate students’
appreciation of- and ability to handle – complexity.
 Involve applications that have a place in the real
world.
 Cast the teacher in role of facilitator and guide – not
answer giver
“Students enter school
as question marks and
graduate as periods.”
•-Neil Postman
What is inquiry?
“The process of addressing
problems expressed by
guiding questions.”
(Wilhelm)
Inquiry based learning
http://www.youtube.com/watc
h?v=sLqi0raxldc&feature=relat
ed
Piaget:
“Every time we teach
a child something,
we keep him from
inventing it.”
Hillocks meta-analysis:
 What are the most effective modes of instruction in the
teaching of composition?
 He analyzed all the studies on teaching composition
and categorized the modes into:
 Grammar instruction
 Free write
 Sentence combining
 Models
 Scales
 Inquiry
Hillocks research
Inquiry:
“Inquiry focuses the attention of students on strategies
for dealing with sets of data, strategies that will be
used in writing. For example, treatments categorized
as inquiry might involve students in finding and
stating specific details that convey personal experience
vividly, in examining sets of data to develop and
support explanatory generalizations or that present
ethical problems and in developing arguments about
those situations.”
-Hillocks, 1986
…the teacher plans and uses activities that result in high
levels of student interaction concerning particular
problems parallel to those they encounter in certain
kinds of writing, such as generating criteria and
examples to develop extended definitions of concepts
or generating arguable assertions from appropriate
data and predicting and countering opposing
arguments…This mode places a priority on high levels
of students involvement… This mode places priority
on structured problem solving activities with clear
objectives, planned to enable students to deal with
similar problems in composing.”
- Hillocks
Why inquiry?
Most effective mode of composition
instruction (Hillocks research)
And
Engages learners
(engagement research)
What keeps teachers teaching?
 Teaching as evolution
 Teaching as autobiography
 Teaching as love
 Teaching as hope and possibility
 Teaching as anger and desperation
 Teaching as intellectual work
 Teaching as democratic practice
 Teaching as shaping the future
(article #74)
Quickwrite:
Think about some aspect of your
curriculum you are really passionate
about teaching and/or learning. What is
it? What content do you get really
excited about teaching and learning with
your students? Why? What excites you
about it? What do you look forward to
learning? To doing?
Topical Inquiry:
 Engages with a disciplinary
question
 Explores what is already known
 Explains and interprets the
established data, articulates
connections seen in the data
Setting up inquiry:
 1. Identify an essential question and associated
enduring understandings
 2. Identify a final project: what can students do
at the end of the unit that will demonstrate
their knowledge.
 3. Create a backwards plan: a carefully ordered
set of activities that support students’ progress,
text by text and activity by activity.
Getting started with a question:
Reframe standards as essential questions
 Go through your standards and circle all the verbs.
The higher level thinking skills the standards call for,
the easier they can be met by inquiry:
* “identify”, “discuss”, “use” are low level
thinking
* “identify and define” and “discuss craft” are
mid level
* “evaluate”, “relate”, “connect”, “question”,
“analyze” are higher level thinking.
What are the questions
worth pursuing?
• What would you do for love? What makes good relationships?
 Civil rights movement: What are our civil rights and how can we
protect and promote them?
 Is war ever necessary?
 What is courage?
 What happened to the dinosaurs?
 Is Holden Caulfield a typical teenager or pathological adolescent?
 What’s wrong with our school and how can we improve it?
 In what ways do present cultures relate to their past and future?
 Can liberty and security be balanced?
 What makes an influential historical figure?
 What are the costs and benefits of cloning stem cell research?
 What is our proper relationship to nature?
 What are the effects of genetically altered organisms?
 Is progress always good?
 What is a good leader?
 What makes a good home –for us, for lobsters, bears?
An essential question:
 Honors students “reality principle”. It addresses
their point of view and need for inquiry to be
interesting and relevant in their terms.
 Addresses the “heart of the discipline” being studied.
Essential disciplinary knowledge is required to
answer it.
 Possesses “emotive force, intellectual bite or
edginess”. It invites students into ongoing
conversation and debates about real world
disciplinary issues.
 Is open-ended, possible to contend, arguable. It
must be complex enough to house multiple
perspectives and possible answers.
 Is concise and clearly stated
 Is linked to data. There are available resources
to use in the pursuit of answers.
 May lead to new questions asked by students.
What could be questions worth
pursuing in your class?
(related to your curriculum)
Identify a final project:
 Identify your absolute bottom-line goals for student
achievement during the unit. The goals should be
enduring understandings – conceptual and
procedural tools that can serve students’ future
work in the disciplines, their future thinking and
living.
 After identifying goals, brainstorm what kinds of
projects/writing would demonstrate student
attainment, understanding, mastery or use of
concepts and procedures.
Examples:
 If the question is: Why did the Union win the Civil
War? The final project might be a written argument,
multimedia display or living-history museum.
 If the question is: What makes a good home? The final
project might be to create a living history museum of
different habitats with students playing roles as
animals and wildlife biologists. Or students could
create Big Book stories about finding the right habitat
from the point of view of the animal or sea creature.
“If our students’ goal is to share their
fascination with a topic and their ideas
about it, then instead of writing like
encyclopedias they’ll be writing in the
literacy nonfiction tradition of John
McPhee and E.B. White.”
-Lucy Calkins
Create a backwards plan
 What do students know and need to know?
 What can we do as a whole group/ small
groups/individually?
 What kind of frontloading do we need to do?
 What resources do I need? Resources available
for students?
 What print and nonprint resources are
available?
 What kind of time do students need?
 How will I support them as they pursue
individual projects?
 What kinds of checkpoints can I build in to
support students’ independent work?
 How will students demonstrate their learning?
Youtube Resources:
 Jeff Wilhelm on Inquiry based
learning:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xpTBZw8mg&feature=topics
 Inquiry based learning in an 8th grade science class:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8Lh5MfyEE&feature=related
 4th grade inquiry: Designing a school:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPrfbiVZmxo&f
eature=fvwrel
 Teaching inquiry learning:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwCmCJ8OhWY
&feature=related
 Teaching with inquiry circles in the elementary
classroom:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bb9cr4FPU_o&f
eature=related
 The steps of inquiry learning demonstrated through
HSIE:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DbWpo9yX00&
feature=related
Multigenre writing
Another way to pursue
inquiry and
demonstrate
understandings
Multigenre and Common Core
Using multiple sources of
information, analyzing and
synthesizing then producing
multiple genres to
demonstrate learning.
Multi-genre writing
Genres can be combined in one format:
 Magazines
 Zines
 Newspapers
 Informational picture books
 Anthology
Multi-genre writing
Or students and teachers can
enter into a kind of contract
identifying a particular number
of different genres to answer
their question.
Getting started:
Identify question(s)
Identify sources
Identify forms
Cohesion and flow
The project should be
arranged in some logical
order. The writer needs to
create a cohesion or flow to
the project.
How do spiders spin webs?
 Two voice poem
 Diary of a spider
 6 word memoir
 Song (using old Spiderman tune)
 Comic strip
 Obituary
 Recipe for a web
Student Samples: Ellis Island
Salem Witch Trials
Walt Disney”
Newsies:
Ben and Jerry’s:
Digital Multigenre projects:
 Aretha Franklin:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFV5OyvnouE&feat
ure=related
 Bob Dylan:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rK1Vp6X_Tw8&feat
ure=related
 A first year teacher’s multi-genre paper:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14OF1fhKPts&featur
e=related
 Walt Disney:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMopnh0QRyo&feat
ure=related
Multi genre resources:
 Ms. Hogues’ online resources:
http://mshogue.com/ce9/multi_genre/multigenre.
htm
 A curriculum web for students writing multi-genre
papers:
https://www.msu.edu/~leboeufb/eng313/index.ht
m
 Sample multigenre projects:
http://writing.colostate.edu/gallery/multigenre/in
dex.htm
Resources from Tom Romano
 Tom’s website with sample multigenre assignments,
rubrics and papers:
http://www.users.muohio.edu/romanots/Tom_Ro
mano.html
 Multi-genre man: Tom Romano:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lucLoTMXxoE
&feature=related
Print Resources:
 Burke, J. (2010) What’s the big idea? Question driven
units to motivate reading, writing and thinking.
Portsmouth: Heinemann.
 Harvey, S. (1998) Nonfiction matters: Reading, writing
and research in grades 3-8. York, Maine: Stenhouse.
 Nieto, S. (2003) What keeps teachers teaching? New York:
Teachers College Press.
 Putz, M. (2006) A teacher’s guide to multigenre research
project. Portsmouth: Heinemann.
 Romano, T. (2000) Blending genre, altering style:
Writing multigenre papers.
 Smith, M. & J. Wilhelm. (2002) Reading don’t fix no
Chevys. Portsmouth: Heinemann
 Smith, M. & J. Wilhelm. (2006) Going with the flow:
(How to engage boys (and girls) in their literacy learning.
Portsmouth: Heinemann
 Wilhelm, J. (2007) Engaging readers and writers with
inquiry. New York: Scholastic.