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Jill Bean's picture

More thoughts on inquiry...

Deb, I woke up thinking about this lesson and again thinking about whether is was Inquiry or not.  I felt like my thoughts had changed somewhat, but I have many of the same thoughts as you too.  

I think if we consider that yesterday was a day to think about "What is inquiry?", then Allison's activity could be considered to be a very structured inquiry lesson, but only as one small part of a larger inquiry.  I think if we decide that we were investigating "What is inquiry?" we could also say that Allison's activity was a structured way of investigating our own meta-cognition.  We started from our own experiences and were able to generate our own stories and our own thoughts about what we needed in order to learn.  I felt like there was room for more than one outcome: we all came up with our own thoughts on what we needed to learn in that situation.  However, once we had generated that list (our data) we didn't do anything with it.  If we had proceeded to examine the generated list and keep working to contruct our understanding of inquiry (using all the methods you describe above) then the activity could have been part of a larger inquiry. 

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