In this Blog Post I thought I would share some problems and solutions that I have found – maybe it will be useful for others!
- Lack of time, always an issue, but I am convinced that any planning you can do beforehand will benefit you and your students, so that valuable time is not lost during lessons.
- Wide Range of reading abilities, I try and gather as many resources as I can including video clips and tool such as speech-to-text apps so that text is available to all reading levels.
- Challenging inquiry questions, I try to pass tricky questions on to ‘experts’ in the field and explain to students that there is not an easy answer to every question – a very valuable lesson.
- During the Share stage, it is wonderful to plan an authentic reasons for sharing – presenting to a real audience or solutions to a real problem is inspirational.
- Inquiry Circles, younger and more ‘egocentric’ students have difficulty with the sharing nature intended for Inquiry Circles. My experience is that students need training and direct instruction in how to participate in Inquiry Circles.
- Identifying meaningful Inquiry questions also needs direct instruction. We use the words like FAT and Skinny to try and build meaningful questions. If a question is ‘Googleable’ then it is probably not a suitable inquiry question. This also needs lots of practice and direct examples.
I hope some of these ideas are helpful.
Margo
