Teaching Inquiry: Can You Walk the Walk?

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Teaching InquiryCan You Walk the Walk?

• Emilie Drobnes
• Goddard Space Flight Center
• Wil van der Veen
• New Jersey Astronomy Center for Education

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How Students Learn

• Principle 1 Engage Prior Understandings
• Principle 2 The Essential Role of Factual
  Knowledge and Conceptual Frameworks in
  Understanding
• Principle 3 The Importance of Self-Monitoring
• From How Students Learn (NRC, 2005)

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Principle 3The Importance of Self-Monitoring
Read the following passage from a literary
critic, and pay attention to the strategies you
use to comprehend If a serious literary critic
were to write a favorable, full-length review of
How Could I Tell Mother She Frightened My
Boyfriends Away, Grace Plumbusters new story,
his startled readers would assume that he had
gone mad, or that Grace Plumbuster was his
editors wife. (SOURCE Whimbey and Whimbey
(1975, p. 42).
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Learning Cycles

• FERA
• Focus Explore Reflect - Apply
• From Science for All Children (NSRC, 1996)
• OPERA
• Open Prior Experience Reflect - Apply
• From What are the Similarities Between
  Scientific Research and Science Education Reform
  (Morrow, 2005)

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Sundials

• Students observe the patterns of day and night
  and
• the movements of the shadows of objects on the
• Earth during the course of a day.
• How would you explore students ideas and
  preconceived notions?
• How would you carry out the experiment?
• How would you help students reflect on the
  experiment?
• How would you help students apply their new
  understandings?

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Contact Information

• Emilie Drobnes
• emilie.drobnes_at_gsfc.nasa.gov
• Wil van der Veen
• wvanderv_at_raritanval.edu
• http//sdoepo.gsfc.nasa.gov/presentations/