Inquiry-based lesson plan – Part 2

NOWADAYS, our young people would spiral into silence, into disappointment if they find their classes requiring rote memory on what they learn. Such a dull class environment results in their attending to their mobile even during class sessions. Inquiry-based approach as a teaching strategy could make a science class have students feel like young scientists. After refreshing our minds on what IBL is, let's go through the unfinished IBL lesson plan we presented last week.

Inquiry-based learning. Inquiry-based learning (IBL) is "a form of active learning that starts by posing questions, problems or scenarios." While traditional education "generally relies on the teacher presenting facts and his/her knowledge about the subject, the teacher is more of a facilitator than a lecturer. As a facilitator, the teacher identifies issues, challenges and problems on a given topic — aimed toward solutions to problems raised in the lesson taught. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inquiry-based_learning) As our source informs, "inquiry-based learning includes problem-based learning, generally used in small-scale investigations and projects," — much "closely related to the development and practice of thinking and problem-solving skills." Our source further informs that at the beginning of the 20th century, the well-known education philosopher John Dewey "was the first to criticize that science education was not taught in a way to develop young scientific thinkers." He then proposed "that science should be taught as a process and way of thinking — not subject content to be memorized" — and "without critical thinking." Based on Dewey's ideas, Joseph Schwab proposed that science should not aim to be "identifying stable truths about the world that we live in." Rather, "science could be a flexible and multi-directional inquiry-driven process of thinking and learning." This characteristic is very obvious in the IBL lesson plan presented last week, which we will conclude today.