Curriculum & Instruction 407:
Inquiry Teaching & Learning
Spring, 1998
Goals, Structure, & Requirements

     This course explores the creation of classrooms in which students and teachers are actively engaged in making meaning through personal and collaborative inquiry. Issues will include integrating across traditional curricular areas, themes, projects, student-centered learning, and connections between the classroom and the social and natural worlds beyond the school. One major issue is the role for teachers as inquirers about their own and their student's learning. The course will also examine challenges to inquiry-based instruction, including those related to management, assessment, basic skills, cultural differences and assumptions, and the responses of parents, principals, and other teachers.

Goals of the Course

The primary goal for this course is to provide an introduction to a way of thinking about teaching and learning. This way of thinking does not ignore the usual focus on content: "What should be taught?," or method: "How should we teach?," but it begins with even more basic sorts of questions, such as:

• What is the purpose of education?
• Why do we have schools?
• What does it mean to know something?
• How do my personal goals relate to how I perceive the world and how I learn?
• Why should anyone learn a given skill or bit of knowledge?
• How does what I do in an educational setting relate to the world beyond?
• Where and how does learning occur?
• Is teaching possible?

As Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner discussed in Teaching as a Subversive Activity, asking questions like these can get you into a lot of trouble. Simple and obvious assumptions about teaching, such as "We need to have clear (even national) standards for what is to be learned," "Learning objectives should be explicit," "The teacher should always provide clear explanations to students," "Learning should proceed from simple tasks to more complex ones," "It's important to determine the learner's readiness to learn," "One has to learn the basics first," and many more, turn out to be neither simple nor obvious.

The course will provide an opportunity for dialogue about these issues. To expand the basis for that dialogue, we will read about, observe, and engage in, inquiries about phenomena in general, and especially about our own teaching and learning.

Structure

Each week will typically involve three kinds of activities:

• During class, we will engage in our own inquiries into topics within language, mathematics, art, music, and both the physical and biological worlds. The purpose of this is not so much to accumulate a set of teaching activities as to provide a common experiential base for us to talk about teaching and learning.
• We will focus on teaching and learning practice through the development, application, and study of inquiry-based approaches to teaching and learning. Part of the class time will be devoted to sharing what we're learning through the research projects and to discussions aimed at understanding what occurs in different learning settings.
• We will discuss articles drawn from a packet of readings. The packet is a diverse collection, including descriptions of classrooms, analyses of student learning, theoretical analyses of inquiry, and critiques of these approaches.

Course Requirements

Readings and discussion [25% of grade.]

You will be expected to participate in discussions of readings throughout the semester. In addition, you will work with a partner to co-lead one discussion session. This is an opportunity for you to suggest alternative readings or to bring in samples of writing from your class or your own work. You and your partner will share your responses to the readings and initiate the class discussion. We plan to work with you in preparing that class.

There is a packet of readings for the course. I deliberately selected more articles for the packet of readings than we will have time to discuss in detail in class. One reason is that I hope you will use the articles as branching-off points in your own inquiries about education. I included a broad array of grade levels, topics, historical moments, and perspectives to make this possible. The packet is by no means complete, but we hope it will serve as a useful reference. A second reason is that we would like the class to take shape around the backgrounds of the students. We have a tentative plan for the selection of readings, but expect to modify that plan as the interests of the group develop.

Writings [25% of grade.]

Writing will include reactions to the readings and responses to the writing of others in the class, especially on the research projects. Electronic mail will be used to extend discussions beyond the scheduled seminar meeting times.

Research Project [50% of grade.]

The major assignment for the course is a teaching/research project on the development, application, and study of an inquiry-based approach to teaching and learning. The project is ideally a collaborative one, done with other students in the class or with people outside the class. Projects will be presented orally in lieu of a written final exam.

Due Dates

For each project there will be four written products (weeks 6, 9, 13, and 15:

• February 23 (week 5): Formation of teams for research projects;
• March 2 (week 6): A written plan (~1-2 pp.) that includes a brief description of a the learning setting, your ideas for what you plan to do, a short list of questions to explore, and a sketch of how you plan to investigate those questions;
• March 30 (week 9): A progress report (~2-3 pp.) that includes some examples;
• April 20 (week 12): Draft report (~5-10 pp.) to share with the class or small working group for reactions and suggestions;
• May 4 (week 14): Final report on the project (~10-15 pp.)
• May 11 (week 15): Oral presentation of the project (15 minutes)