Teaching and Learning with Testa

  My next set of classes has started.  We are reading The Reflective Educator’s Guide to Classroom Research in one class, and Chapter 1 mentions starting an inquiry journal.  The book is about doing inquiry-based research or active research in your classroom.  It discusses the importance of intentionally writing down the observations of the class (Dana and Yendol-Hoppey, 2020).  This makes sense, given that you have a lab, research, engineering notebook that needs to be done if you are doing scientific research.  These are taken seriously as the documentation.  I think teachers should be doing this as well.  I thought this would be a great place to my inquiry journal and record my thoughts.  My hope of learning about inquiry-based research is to do more research in my classroom.  I want to use data in my classroom to drive my teaching methodologies and maybe publish (One of these days, I will write about how much I fear writing).  Even if I don’t publish, I would like to use my re

As I end the inquiry-based learning course, I am amazed at how my inquiry understanding has deepened.  Even after 20 years of teaching using questioning and having students provide evidence of their learning, I still have evolved my experience. Inquiry-based learning is a way to have students explore how to learn.  When teachers use inquiry in their classrooms, students learn critical thinking.  Students are gaining experience to provide justification and evidence for their understanding.  They are spending time on the higher-level thinking skills of Bloom’s taxonomy.  Students need to evaluate information and synthesize old and new knowledge.  They have a teacher as a mentor, guide, and facilitator, not just as the person who has all the control.  This is crucial for students to become well-rounded individuals. My biggest takeaway is that students gain more control of the classroom.  Students having control does not mean it is a constant party, and no learning is happening as many may

It is interesting that when in high school, seniors state “I can’t wait to be done with learning.” I have heard this year after year from graduates.  Here I am still learning after over 20 years of teaching. I have really never stopped learning, and that is the goal of inquiry-based learning.  Students are creating the learning, to learn that they will have to continue to learn throughout their life.  Whether it be as simple as changing a toilet seat in your bathroom, to determine the amount of paint you will need to paint a room in your house that is not square, to learning how to write lessons that allow students to be the center of their learning (all three of these I did this week).  Engagement, Exploration, Explanation, Elaboration, Evaluation.  These 5 simple words were the focus of creating one of the lessons (Number Systems)  for my Big Data Unit .  These are the focus of the BSCS Science Learning model for inquiry-based learning (Bybee, et al, 2006).  Focusing the lesson throu

In the past two weeks of Inquiry-Based Learning graduate class, I have been working on developing good questions that are inquiry-based and looking at web-based tools that can help students with the inquiry.   If you have been following my journey, helping students develop good questioning techniques is something that interests me.  Understanding how to ask questions for different situations is a part of learning.  In addition, this helps students learn by doing and take risks by asking questions they don’t know the answer to but can investigate by research, experimentation, and data analysis.   Students are naturally curious, they want to learn about the world around them.  By helping them learn how to ask questions we can assist them with the understanding that we are looking to aim for higher-level thinking.  Students should understand Bloom’s taxonomy and aim for the applying and analyzing questions:  How, Why, Should, Would?.  Inquiry questions also are beyond this as well, you ne

When I first thought of problem-based learning(PrBL) students need to solve a real-world problem. I thought about the innovation challenges where students are designing items to solve a need for a community or person. I thought about design thinking workshops where students engineered a plan to fix the cafeteria seating. I think about the Anatomy and Physiology class where students are solving case studies (Punahou, 2011). I thought about my own class Design of Emerging Technology (DET) where some students design a project to solve an issue they see (mail sensor, sensors for low stock items, light that changes based on heart rate). These are all real-world problems and fall under the umbrella of Project-based learning in my mind. In fact, some of my students in DET would create art installations and be more project-based. Then I read Krall’s (2012b) statement “we need to define what is an “authentic mathematical experience”. A mathematical experience to me is something that promotes ma

 For the past three weeks, I have emerged in STEM and inquiry-based thinking for both courses I am taking this half of the Spring semester.  This has been an intense three weeks of reading various discussions, articles, and videos on what is STEM and Inquiry Based Learning and how are these used in the classroom.  The material has been thought-provoking.  I have spent the last three weeks writing about the material to develop my own knowledge. I have been involved in inquiry-based learning myself as I develop my own knowledge of the topic. In an inquiry based classroom, the focus is on investigations and answering questions based upon evidence.  Students are learning by doing. STEM naturally leads educators to be inquiry-based. Although this can be done in all classes, the Learning Channel(n.d) has a great video from Urban Academy demonstrating an inquiry-based classroom in both English and History. (Note: Learning Channel is not free but you can watch one video for free with an accoun