Inquiry Models - in class

1. What is scientific inquiry? What does inquiry-oriented teaching and learning look like? Scientific inquiry is an approach to learning that implicitly requires students to use critical and higher-order thinking skills in order to solve a problem or answer a question. In inquiry-based science, students are the scientists rather than the recipients of teacher-oriented lectures. Students work together and individually to engage in scientifically-oriented questions, to collect evidence pertinent to the question, to explain their evidence, to evaluate their explanations using other sources, and finally to communicate those findings and evaluations to others. Scientific inquiry looks like how I described above - the teacher serving as a facilitator among freethinking and explorative students. Evidence is collected by the individuals, not handed to them on a worksheet. Students (or scientists) are at the center of this learning.