What in the Inquiry?

Last week the Penn State ag ed cohort had the opportunity to attend an Inquiry Institute led by the the great Mrs. Krista Pontius. Unfortunately, I was not able to attend due to being sick. I was super bummed that I missed such an incredible opportunity, but luckily Mrs. Pontius was able to sit with me one on one and teach me about what I missed and my advisors were able to give me resources so I could truly understand what inquiry based learning is.

Inquiry based learning is when students are given the autonomy to find answers to their questions on their own and can help create a greater understanding of subjects. It gives students the power to control what they take from their learning experience. During inquiry based learning students are given the materials they need to complete a lab or task, but it is meant for them to do it without the help of the instructor. Often times the teacher only poses the question, while the students have to solve it on their own using their own thinking process and their peers.

Mrs. Pontius shared with me some awesome inquiry lesson ideas. One of the lessons that really stood out to me was called "Tragedy of the Commons."In this lesson students are given the problem. The problem is "how can the overuse of an ecosystem be prevented?" Students are given "fish in a pond" and have to use different fishing limits to see how it effects the population of fish in the pond. The fish are gold fish crackers and Swedish fish in a bowl of jello. Students use chopsticks as a fishing rod to see how many fish they can catch. For example, if there is no fishing limit and the get to take the fish out of the pond they are going to clean the pond out. They continue to work with different fishing limits to see how much it effects the population. The inquiry part of this lesson is at the very end when student have to decide what the fishing limit should be to still be able to have a good population of fish in the pond. It shows students the importance of hunting and fishing limits. There are also many more inquiry lesson such as using the scientific method to see if double stuffed Oreos are actually consistently double stuffed, or even studying misconceptions in agriculture.

Even though I missed the Inquiry institute I was able to learn some pretty valuable material. I am planning on using inquiry based lessons when I am a teacher because I think it is a great way to allow students to take control of their learning. In agriculture education there are many opportunity for experiments and questioning so I know it will fit right in with the content that I will be teaching.

Thats all for this weeks story with Ms. Sweeten. Thanks for reading!