Inquiry Based Learning: Part 2

A few weeks ago I wrote a blog post about inquiry-based learning in which I explained the purpose of a Wonder Day project and then shared a short example about the history of forks. While this type of project is a lot of fun, and I sincerely hope I get the chance to try it with my students at some point this year, it is not very practical for day-to-day use.

In my student teaching placement this year, the teaching team is working with a new inquiry-based curriculum in language arts. This curriculum strongly encourages cyclical learning, where students read a text multiple times and look for deeper meaning each time. Similarly, students free write over and over and over, gradually choosing writing samples that they want to expand and revise. On the positive side, this method of learning gives students many chances to build on and refine their skills. Where the teachers are struggling, however, is with the fact that students are being asked to build and refine skills they have not yet acquired.

How can students “write in a genre” if they do not know what “genre” is? How can students write argumentative papers if they have never been taught how to identify parts of an argument? The traditional approach would answer this question by saying “we need to take two or three class periods and teach the skills.” The inquiry-based curriculum is saying “let them struggle through it and ask questions, figuring out the answers as a group of peers.”

As is often the case with polarized opinions, maybe the solution can be found somewhere in the middle. Instead of telling students the answers in the forms of lecture, notes, and worksheets, maybe we provide a genre list and then use structured student talk to encourage an inquiry-based approach to understanding. It’s not throwing them into an activity blind, but it’s not giving them answers either.

The problem of implementing inquiry-based learning on a practical level is not unique to language arts classes, either. Even the fun idea of a Wonder Day project will fail if students have never been taught how to research. I love inquiry-based learning. I think the idea of letting students form their own questions and then work (either individually or as a group) to find their answers is a powerful tool for learning. It simultaneously teaches content and helps students form critical thinking and problem solving skills they will need for the real world.

With that said, I am also seeing the danger in inquiry-based learning when students do not have the skills and/or knowledge they need to answer their own questions. When this happens, they might give up on their work completely, learning nothing from it at all, or they might reinforce preexisting bad habits. I don’t know the perfect solution to this conundrum of inquiry-based learning; I think it’s a valuable method, but also one that needs to be used carefully if it is to be successful.

If you have any thoughts or ideas regarding the day-to-day use of inquiry-based learning, please share in the comments!

Self-Care and Blending Language Arts with Social Studies

Last Tuesday my Language Arts Pedagogy class took a “self-care day” and went into Portland, Oregon to see the musical In The Heights at Portland Center Stage. The goal behind the outing was to remind us that as teachers we will need to engage in regular self-care. Extroverted teachers will need time to recharge with people who are not middle schoolers, and introverted teachers (like me) will need time to be a part of something that requires no active social participation.

As teacher candidates, we have been told countless times about the importance of self-care, but had not been given much time to actually practice it. Our self-care has come in the forms of 6am workouts or late-night baking extravaganzas. While these daily activities are great for self-care, they are very different from the more rare restorative activities such as going to see a play or traveling to a new and exciting place.

With this understanding in mind, my language arts class took the night off from our textbooks and lesson plans, piled into cars, and drove to the theater. In The Heights was the first musical written by composer and actor Lin-Manuel Miranda, who famously opened the curtain on the Broadway sensation Hamilton in 2015. In The Heights tells the story of a summer in the New York borough of Washington Heights, filled with first and second generation latin immigrants struggling and working to succeed in America. It is full of gorgeous writing, themes, and character development–everything my literary brain could hope for–but it is also a historical piece in its own way.

When I am trying to teach my students history, I am not just teaching them about dates and events. I am teaching them about cultures: why cultures are the way they are and how they change and evolve over time. As I watched In The Heights, I wasn’t thinking about the implications of Latin immigration on everyday life in New York City in the 21st century, but I left the show with a deeper understanding of that culture.

I don’t have any deeply profound and practical insights about teaching to share this week, but I do have a realization: self-care does not need to be exclusive of learning. Personally, I love learning; helping people learn how to learn is one of the main reasons I want to become a teacher. When it comes to self-care, I need to remind myself to go places, watch shows, rock out at concerts, or spend a whole evening curled up by a fire with a book. But once I have done those things, when I am feeling refreshed and recharged, it’s okay for me to analyze them.

Maybe I use the lyrics from the concert to teach sound devices to my students; maybe I use a scene from the play to show my students that we are surrounded by cultures. These are great things to do, and they don’t diminish my self-care time. Sharing art forms I love with my students will expose them to a wider variety of literature and history than what their textbooks can provide for them, and maybe some of them will even be interested enough to listen to it, look at it, watch it, or read it themselves. And then we can really talk.

As always, please feel free to share your comments below!

Inquiry-Based Learning: Wonder Day Projects

I have written previously on my blog about my undergraduate experiences in the William Penn Honors Program at George Fox University. This program was one of the highlights of my four years of college, as it involves a Socratic Seminar-style read-through of some of the greatest philosophy, literature, theology, and social science in the history of the written word. What I haven’t unpacked previously is how this style of education prepared me to be an inquiry-based teacher or learner.

While our texts were always chosen for us in the William Penn Honors Program, our discussion topics were not. We would read a text, come to class, and ask whatever questions we wanted about what we had read. We came up with huge and difficult questions: What is the good life? What does it look like to be happy? How do science and religion interact? How should we define “home” in an increasingly global world? These are all questions that people have been asking for a long time, and we spent four years adding our thoughts to the great conversations of history.

So how can I take this inquiry-based method and transfer it to my middle school classroom? I can’t ask these questions, open-ended, to my middle school students. If I do, they will come up with answers that include ninjas descending from the ceiling and marshmallow monsters eating all of Antarctica’s ice. The thing about those responses is that they are openings to really interesting historical explorations. What if I let my students research the history of ninjas or the history of climate change and its effects in the Antarctic seas? These questions would be perfect springboards for an inquiry-based “wonder day project.”

One thing I love about inquiry-based learning is that the lessons are driven by questions. At its core, that is all “Inquiry-Based Learning” is; students ask questions and then come up with their own answers. In a Wonder Day Project (or a Wonder Week Project if time allows) students ask a question, research their answers, and then present their findings using their favorite format. They might use blogs, videos, podcasts, comic strips, posters, or traditional writing forms.

In order to demonstrate what this might look like, I created my own Wonder Day exemplar: I researched the history of the fork and then made a short podcast explaining what I learned. If you’re interested, you can listen here:

As always, please feel free to leave your comments below!

Courageous Conversations and the Power of Narrative in Social Studies

As part of the coursework for my Master’s program, I am enrolled in a Social Studies Pedagogy class that meets once a week in the evenings to talk about what good social studies instruction looks like. This week, our class happened to fall on September 11th, and we opened up our discussion together by talking about how our various schools had talked about the terrorist acts of September 11th, 2001. Responses varied from school to school, but as we started talking and comparing, we began to realize that this event in history holds different weight for different people. And that difference is not confined to 9/11; many historical events affect our students, and as teachers we may not always know the trauma that may dwell in our classrooms.

At the same time, though, as social studies teachers it is our job to teach difficult periods in history. We have to teach about injustices and tragedies, and we have to do so with both compassion and courage. So how do we have these “courageous conversations” with our students? How do we talk about hard things while still respecting students’ feelings? Maybe 9/11 is a good place to start thinking about this, especially for us west-coasters for whom 9/11 was personal but also removed. Maybe it can be a kind of springboard to building a classroom culture of trust, empathy, and respect.

My seventh graders weren’t alive when 9/11 occurred. To be fair, I only remember it in bits and pieces–I was barely in grade school at the time. While I may not have comprehended the full impact of the event at the time it happened, I can still remember firsthand the drastic changes that occurred in national security after the attacks. I still remember the widespread fear of Americans realizing that our nation cannot always protect us from tragedy, and that our safety is not something that can be taken for granted. My middle school students don’t remember that change in national identity, and it’s the kind of thing that’s difficult to explain using a textbook, but it may be the most important part of history to convey to students.

The 9/11 Memorial, New York City, 2016. Photo Credit Dakota Buhler

In many ways, 9/11 is a tame example. Even more complex difficulties come when we begin to teach topics like mass genocides and wars fought by child soldiers. These are important subjects to address, but they require courageous conversations. As social studies teachers, how can we teach events like these, that left an impact on so many people, without making the lesson just like any other “this day in history” lesson? How do we talk about tragedies in a way that conveys the emotional impact without being overly depressing? We need to find a way to broach these subjects without a) subjecting our students to unnecessarily traumatic content or b) sugar-coating history. Neither extreme is fair to our students, but the middle ground can feel murky at best, unnavigable at worst.

My answer to this dilemma likely comes from the language arts side of me. I believe stories are always the solution. Narrative has power, so when I need to teach my students about the hard realities of history I hope to always use stories as my way in. As counterintuitive as it seems, I believe learning about one person is often more important than learning about a multitude. When I read “six million Jews died in the Holocaust,” I think “Wow, that’s a big number” long before I think of the reality of what the number means.

On the flip side, when I read Diary of Anne Frank I see the story of one girl who wants nothing more than to be a normal teenage girl, whose heart is as big as any I can imagine, and my heart breaks for her as I realize that she is going to lose everyone and everything, including her own life. The story may not give me numbers and statistics, but it does give me a snapshot of life at a point in history. It gives me the empathy and courage to have difficult but genuine conversations, and maybe that’s more important than learning a number.

Bulletin Board Shenanigans

Last week was my official first week of student teaching, full of highs and lows. I was excited to meet my CT (Cooperating Teacher), the teaching team at the middle school where I have been placed, and to get into the classroom for the first time. I was terrified to do all those same things. As an introvert, meeting an entire staff of new people was honestly a little terrifying, especially as the one other full-time student teacher in the building (who is also in an ELA classroom) is a wild and fun extrovert who seems to mingle flawlessly and continually. I, on the other hand, spent my week observing the building culture and dynamic. I met other teachers, I participated in professional development and helped set up classrooms. I helped the librarian catalog some new text books, and in doing so learned the library system at my new school. Everything I did last week seemed beneficial, but it was hard to avoid feeling as if I wasn’t a part of the “in-crowd.”

I truly think that by the time Thanksgiving hits I will feel as if I could never work in another building. My placement school is a tight community, and my teaching team is an even tighter one. My team is comprised of young female language arts teachers who all have big ideas and enough experience to make them happen. In comparison, I have SO MUCH to learn about setting high expectations for students and holding them to those standards. I need to learn how to motivate students who simply refuse to read or write silently for ten minutes in class. This year, I’m here to learn, and I’m excited to learn. Part of me knows that I can be a great teacher–I honestly believe I wouldn’t be where I am now if I didn’t trust my potential as a teacher. Another part of me thinks I will never get there. I know I will, but having my own class next Fall seems nothing short of terrifying at the moment.

On to the actual topic of this blog post: I made a bulletin board on my first day of student teaching. In her previous classroom, my CT had two bulletin boards about her subjects. Her language arts board was covered with quotes about reading and writing and getting lost in the worlds of books, while her social studies board was covered with magazine cut-outs of places, people, and foods from around the world. As my first-day-of-school task, she asked me to combine the two old boards into one. I spent almost three hours collaging the quotes and photos onto a huge slab of turquoise butcher paper, adding borders and lettering to indicate the subjects. I thought it looked lively, energetic, and incredible.

I came back the next day to my first piece of constructive criticism as a student teacher (the first of many, I’m sure). The SPED teacher had stopped by the room to chat the previous afternoon and noticed the new board. After taking a look at my hard work, she pointed out that the busyness could be distracting for a number of SPED students. She is completely correct–I had gotten so caught up in the excitement of creating the board that I hadn’t taken the time to stop and think about how my students might react to what I deemed the “lively and energetic” bulletin board.

After some consultation, we decided that there was nothing wrong with the board as a whole and that the problem could likely be solved by decluttering the areas with lettering. We took down about fifteen photos, adjusted a handful of others, and got a thumbs-up from the SPED teacher. Now it’s just a matter of seeing what the students think when they start their first day of school tomorrow. Time to start earning some jewels!

I always welcome comments on my posts–please feel free to leave your thoughts below!

What Does It Mean to Earn My Jewels?

You’re gonna be you, and it’s gonna take a lifetime of practice. And practice is awkward. Practice is a struggle. Practice is a fight.

— Jon Foreman

Today I completed the whirlwind of my second day of grad school. My name is Dakota; I am working towards my Master’s degree in Education and I will be student teaching in a 7th grade language arts and social studies classroom this coming Fall, after the completion of my summer coursework. The program in which I am currently studying includes one cohort of elementary education teachers and two cohorts of secondary (middle and high school) teachers, but various combinations of the three groups have been grouped together for various classes and workshops in our first few days. Because of this, there is often no clear indication of which level a particular student is aiming to teach, and many of my instructors and fellow students have asked me the standard question, “what level are you?”.

Though I will be licensed at the middle and high school levels, I am spending my year in a middle school, so that has become my go-to answer. “Middle school,” I keep replying. “I’m student teaching 7th grade next year.” As most of the inquiries come from members of other groups, the reactions to my response have almost always been the same: “Wow, you’re brave. I could never do middle school.” One instructor today sorted us by group and then looked at us brave middle school teacher candidates and said, “You’re all earning your jewels, aren’t you?”. The metaphor was framed as a compliment–as a commendation for choosing to teach a group she would not have chosen for herself–but it got me thinking about why I am so excited to be teaching middle school students.

Eleven to fourteen year-olds are in-betweeners. As a stereotype, they have lost the blind obedience of elementary schoolers but still lack the maturity of high schoolers. They don’t fit in a category, and I think that’s what makes them scary. Middle school students tend to be snarky because sarcasm is a way to state an opinion without committing to it fully. They tend to only see the very surface of life because they are just realizing that they are going to be allowed to look for themselves, and looking takes practice. They tend to be snitty and mean because they haven’t learned how to express themselves without alienating the people around them. I love middle schoolers because they are just starting to figure all this out for themselves. So yes, maybe this means that by teaching them I will someday get jewels in my metaphorical crown. I don’t know. All I know is that I can’t wait to see what this year holds, and that I am prepared to do what it takes to be the best teacher I can be. I haven’t earned my jewels yet, and it may be a long time before I do, but this year is my first step to trying.

Becoming My Mom

I distinctly remember the day, one sunny spring afternoon in seventh grade, when my two best friends and I decided what we were going to be when we grew up. We had finally grown tired of the inflatable backyard pool and were laying on the grass talking as only middle school girls can. Lauren was going to be a professional writer who taught kindergarten to make ends meet since writing probably wouldn’t be the most lucrative career option. Kailey was going to be a chemical scientist and was going to make lots of money discovering the cure for some obscure tropical disease. For my part, I wasn’t sure what I was going to be, but I did know one thing: I was not going to be my mom. 

My mom teaches middle school advanced language arts and coaches volleyball and track at the local high school. I was in her class 90 minutes a day, five days a week, for two years when I was in middle school, and then was her athlete all four years of high school. She was a teacher and a coach long before she was ever a mother, and we had positive relationships in every capacity. Before school, she was my mom. At school, she was my teacher. After school she was my coach, and after practice she was back to being my mom again. I loved her class and I respected her as my teacher, but I knew I never wanted to do what she did.

Fast forward ten years and here I am today, working hard to do exactly what my mom does. By the end of next school year I hope to have a job as a middle school language arts teacher, and to be scoping out potential opportunities for coaching high school track. I love middle school students; I can’t wait to be surrounded by their energy and identity discovery. My dream would be to teach advanced 7th/8th grade LA classes, where I can teach deeper content and really push the students who are ready to be pushed. In short, I want to teach exactly what my mom teaches. 

In case copying her teaching demographic isn’t enough, many of the techniques I plan to use in my classroom are ones I learned from my mom. Not every piece of writing needs to be red-pen graded, but students should be given a lot of writing. That’s my mom’s philosophy. Essays that are going to get corrected by the teacher should be graded and returned as quickly as possible. That’s also my mom’s philosophy. I agree with both of those beliefs, and they are practices to which I plan to hold myself accountable as a teacher. I plan to use her agenda/whiteboard set-up, her essay folders and turn-in basket set-ups, her subtle redirection strategies, and even some of her projects or assignments if they will work in my curriculum. In a lot of ways, I want to become my mom in the classroom.

When it comes to sports, I used to think it was ridiculous that my mom taught at the middle school and coached at the high school. Why don’t you coach at the school where you teach? It makes so much more sense logistically and relationally, but once again, here I am hoping to teach middle school and coach high school. While I do love middle school students, a full school day is plenty of time for me to spend with them. High schoolers make a nice maturity balance to the wilderness of middle school. In addition, middle school athletes are simply not ready to learn what I am ready to teach them when it comes to track and field. My favorite track event isn’t even available in middle school, and I want to coach athletes who are physically and mentally ready to make subtle and difficult alterations to specific physical movements. With very few exceptions, middle school athletes are not ready for that. There is definitely value to middle school athletics, but they’re not for me; once again, I am left in the position of becoming my mom.

When Lauren and Kailey and I were sitting around the pool deciding what we wanted to be, I was the only one who was dead wrong. Kailey just graduated with a degree in public health–she’s not quite curing obscure tropical diseases, but she’s probably educating people about them. Lauren is not teaching kindergarten, but she is teaching. She just finished her first full year teaching middle school language arts in the Santa Barbara area, and I am hoping to join that content area train next year, teaching middle school language arts somewhere in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. As a seventh grader, I didn’t know what I wanted to be, but I am definitely excited about where I am and where I am going.

Socratic Education in My Future Classroom

What I learned from four years of intensive socratic seminars, and how I plan on using that as a teacher.

The Death of Socrates, by Jacques-Louis David (1787)

Before my undergraduate career, I had done exactly one formal socratic seminar in my life. It had been in my AP Literature class, and only happened because my teacher was being formally observed for his Master’s program in education and he needed his “good” class to do a “good” lesson for his observation. That seminar was probably pretty decent, as far as high school socratic seminars go, but there were major awkward moments, too, and I left the day wondering whether I had said enough, or whether I had appeared to be “actively involved,” as the rubric required.

Little did I know that within four years of that day in class, I would have participated in nearly two hundred formal socratic seminars. My undergraduate program of study was centered around a Socratic style of education. Over the course of four years, we read chronologically through history’s greatest works of philosophy, literature, theology, and social sciences, discussing each text for two and a half hours in socratic form. That high school version of me, who left her seminar wondering whether she had said enough to be an active participant, would have been terrified to know that feeling would never quite go away.

Over those four years, I came to greatly value the process of a socratic-style discussion. I believe the style is a valuable way to teach students to take ownership of their learning: to read a text or analyze a video with the knowledge that they will need to know it well enough to become a part of the conversation it invites. I plan on using socratic seminars in my own classroom for exactly those reasons. 

As I enter into the field of teaching, and I look at the ways in which socratic seminars may be integrated into my teaching style, there are a few things for me to keep in mind–things from my own experience that I need to remember as I take over the teacher’s perspective. 

The first is that not every student will participate. I was often that student. There were days when I sat through two and a half hours of discussion and didn’t say a single word. That’s a problem. In a twenty minute discussion, it’s true that not everyone will talk, and that listening is just as important as talking, but if a student has sat through four or five seminars over the course of the year and has never once spoken, the teacher needs to do something. The Socratic method revolves around the assumption that every participant will participate; if that means giving students “talking tokens” that they are required to toss into the middle of the circle when they talk, use those. Listening is important, but never talking is not okay.

The second thing I believe teachers need to remember when leading a socratic seminar is that silences are okay. Yes, they’re awkward, and yes, as a future teacher I completely understand the desire to fill them. Refrain. Eventually, one of the students will be so awkwarded out by the awkward silence that they will speak up. If the silence stretches on too long, consider tossing out a new question or bringing attention to a different part of the text. Make it a generic, open-ended question, and maybe even let it stray a bit into personal experience instead of remaining strictly in the text. Seminar leaders have options for moving the conversation along, but only use those once you have fully exhausted the power of the awkward silence. 

The final thing I want to point out about socratic seminars is that foundational content matters. It’s impossible to have a good discussion if you have a shallow, easy text. On the flip side, it’s nearly impossible to have a good discussion if the text is so far past students’ abilities that they are unable to comprehend what they are supposed to be discussing. A good text (I’m using text as a general term; this could also be a video, a piece of music, a work of art, etc.) must fit within the students’ ability level while presenting complex ideas. The best seminars, in my experience, have been with moderate-level texts that bring up deeply personal, applicable issues. When you find the right texts, the seminar will fly by.

These are just a few elements of socratic seminars that I plan to keep in mind while using this method in my future classrooms. I believe that the Socratic method is a fun and engaging way to let the students take control of discussion on a large scale, but it also comes with its challenges. This is not an “all-day every-day” activity for secondary students, but it is definitely something that I hope to integrate as I go into the field of education.

Feel free to continue the conversation in the comments below! If you are interested in reading more about trends in college-level socratic seminars, I wrote this article for studybreaks magazine after my junior year of undergrad.