On Monday we had the opportunity to visit an inquiry based classroom at George Jay Elementary.  Rebecca Bathurst-Hunt, co-author of Inquiry Mindset, was kind enough to host our tech class for an afternoon visit with her.

http://rebeccabathursthunt.com

While there she spoke about the different stages of inquiry and gave us examples of how it could be used in different classrooms.

Retrieved from:

http://rebeccabathursthunt.com/sketchnotes/

She teaches kindergarten, which means that she rarely moves beyond controlled inquiry with her students. However, she has reached the less teacher guided inquiry once in the past years with her students. A key take away that I had was that just because you are an inquiry based classroom, that does not mean that you don’t have teacher guided questions and projects. It is important to start out with structured inquiry if your students have never experienced inquiry before. I also reflected that, just as students progress and process at different rates, some students may need teacher guided inquiery for a longer time, while others may be ready for a free inquiry at a faster rate.

We were also given the chance to explore her classroom. I have put some pictures from the class below.

She also gave us the link to her slideshow, which is posted below as well.

bit.ly/IMUvic2018