Use inquiry to facilitate learning by helping students discover the answers to their questions without providing one, this helps them embrace the trial and error process.

Goal:
  • Help students gain confidence and problem solving skills.
  • Facilitate the development of perseverance and patience in your students.
  • Provide students the opportunity to become self-motivated, proactive learners through doing their own research.
Reason:
  • Students learn better through active-learning and discovery rather than being fed answers and information.
    • There are missed opportunities for learning and growth when teachers rush students through the work or immediately step in with suggestions and solutions.
  • Prepare students for the real world by simulating it in the classroom. In the real world people talk to each other and search the internet to find solutions to the things they’re working on.
    • The problem solving process takes time, and the best way to students to understand this is to try it first hand.
    • In the real world, employees often have to learn on the job, they don't have an expert standing next to them to deliver answers or troubleshoot when something doesn’t work. Jobs take more than five minutes to complete and we need to make sure our students are prepared for life out of school.
Action:
  • Encourage students to look at other resources to get answers.
    • This includes searching online material or consulting students nearby working through a similar issue.
  • Ask pointed questions to get students thinking again when they ask for help or get frustrated.
  • Instead of spending hours researching and testing every lesson to guarantee that everything is perfect, involve your students in the process of testing and learning new material.
    • This gives you an opportunity to show students that they can find solutions on their own instead of waiting for someone to tell them what to do.