Students must be taught how to think instead of what to do.
Inquiry-based learning is promoting the engagement of the students in the classroom and motivating them to ask more questions in the school. The idea is to encourage the students to explore materials, ask questions, and share their ideas with other students.
Learning by doing is the best approach to remember the concepts for ages. This helps in expanding the knowledge base through exploration, experience, and discussion. Inquiry-based learning helps to maximize the retention levels of the students and thus improving the performance in exams in the outturn.
We retain 75% of WHAT WE DO as compared to 5% of WHAT WE HEAR and 10% of WHAT WE READ. Inquiry-based learning means triggering curiosity and activating the students’ interest to learn new things. It helps in increasing engagement levels of the student and prompting the students to take steps towards learning new things on their own.
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4 Stages of Inquiry-Based Learning
Inquiry-based learning is the most effective and promising solution to inhibit unique and creative abilities in students. This regularly needs synchronization in the system by the teachers so that students find things flowing smoothly and interestingly.
- Let Students develop a statement of the problem or questions that would require them to further dive into the topic for responses, inquiry, and citations.
- Give time to students to have a research on the topic in the classroom. Interact with the students on how to perform their analysis on the subject and brush up their skills that will be required in the research.
- Ask the students to present what they’ve learned. The students should be taught how to give and communicate about their research in front of a bunch of people. This helps in improving the research ability, confidence, and also chances of getting suggestions for improvement increase.
- Have Students put the focus on HOW THEY LEARNED in addition to WHAT THEY LEARNED. The students should be made to reflect on what they have worked and how they have worked. Reflection holds the key to successfully implementing inquiry-based learning. Thinking about thinking is the central ideology which is to be inhibited in students mind.The four steps of Inquiry-Based Learning is to change the method of traditional teaching and involve the following
innovative steps of education:
- Interaction
- Clarification
- Questioning
- Justification of inquiry
What Are the Benefits of Inquiry-based Learning?
Inquiry-Based Learning is a magical cure for improving the critical thinking capacities of students. Besides this, many other benefits are changing the way of learning and teaching.
Nurture Student’s Passions and Talents
The inquiry learning method allows the student to work up and research their points of interest and talents. By promoting a student and guiding them from time to time, the teachers tend to prove a more significant objective of nurturing the student’s passion and talent.
Empower Student Voice and Honor Student Choice
This method of teaching and learning helps in increasing the self-confidence and self-esteem levels of students. Many times in the traditional methods of education, the ideas of students are not heard and go in vain. But the inquiry-based learning helps to extract the voices and opinions of students deep from their heart and also allows students to uplift their confidence and public speaking skills.
Increasing Motivation and Engagement
Students are made to perform research on the topic of their interest and passion. The field and the question of the subject are of the students’ interests, and researching anything in the area of passion is seamlessly interesting. Performing research on the area of interest is bound to help in increasing the motivation and engagement levels of students.
Foster Curiosity and Love of Learning
The central ideology behind this is to trigger the student’s curiosity levels of learning and provide them an environment in which they can perform research and work upon the skills that will help them for the longer-term.
Deepen Understanding to Go Beyond Facts and Content
Breaking the law of spoon-feeding students with facts and figures and making them learn for exams is an age-old trick. The ancient method does not help to make use of the topics and chapters taught in daily life environment. The new and modern technique of learning makes the student take up the responsibility and perform practical research to improve their learning capacity levels.
Solve the Problems of Tomorrow in the Classroom of Today
The modern techniques help to learn the things and techniques which will be useful for the stages in the future. Practical skills valuable in the future can be learned just by thinking about thinking and learning about thought and ideology. Inquiry-based learning helps to improve the capacity of critical thinking and to make decisions quickly and smoothly.
The need of the hour is to implement the modern approach of inquiry-based learning to help prepare the working professionals of tomorrow. Based on a recent study by UNICEF, the skillset of the persons is on a declining graph, and by the end of 2030, a majority of the population won’t have the skills desired for building a great workforce. The only solution to prepare the workforce of tomorrow is to start taking baby steps and promote the love of researching, learning, and extracting about different topics in students.
