Learning Explorations

Professional Development for Teachers

Mission

Our mission is to support teachers in engaging students in authentic scientific inquiry and sense-making - making self-directed explorations and observation of natural phenomena, finding questions to explore, devising ways of gathering, organizing and displaying data - and create a community of science learners in the classroom.

  • Collaborate with teachers to devise ways to assess, document and make student thinking visible for the purpose of devising experiences to sustain student engagement and support students in their own learning.
  • Engage teachers as researchers of students' science learning for the purpose of building teachers' capacities and confidence in teaching science.
  • Engage teachers in doing what scientists do to enhance their capacities to introduce scientific practices into the experiences of their students and improve their knowledge and vision of science as a field of study.
  • Create a forum for teachers to share and explore experiences with inquiry in their classrooms.

Inquiry-based teaching and learning engages both students and teachers as researchers of natural phenomena.

Students explore and research materials and scientific phenomena their teachers present to them. Students gain knowledge and understanding of scientific phenomena and develop the practices and habits of mind of contemporary scientists as they make self-directed explorations, doing what scientist do (observing, classifying, modeling, experimenting).

Teachers explore and research their students' self-directed science learning. Teachers become facilitators of learning and knowing rather than transmitters of information.

Students and teachers are observers, questioners, explorer, inquirers, data gatherers, thinkers, sense-makers, imaginers, innovators, inventers, creators, collaborators, communicators. Classrooms are transformed into places of deep learning as students and teachers work together, co-constructing knowledge, as a scientific learning community. Such environments of deep learning nurture the ways of thinking and interacting necessary for successful engagement with a rapidly changing, increasingly diverse unknowable and unpredictable world.

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StudentWorldTeacher Site

Learning by Exploring

Exploring How We Learn

A Powerful Combination!

Through following students' explorations, teachers deepen their knowledge of the subject matter, their understanding of student thinking, and their structuring of the subject matter to open the world to students.

Students deepen their understanding of the world by self-exploring natural phenomena appropriately guided along their path by teachers.

The relationship is inter-dependent as explorations of one, widens and opens the world/understanding of the other.

Our Professional Development Model

Experiencing Learning Explorations

1. We experience inquiry learning.

Exploring Learning Explorations

2. We explore ways to deepen inquiry learning.

Designing Learning Explorations

3. We develop learning explorations for our students.

Seeing and Describing Learning Explorations

4. We look for inquiry in student work.

Documenting Learning Explorations

5. We document our findings.

Experiencing, Exploring, Designing, Describing, and Documenting Learning Explorations
The Benefits of Learning Explorations

Research into inquiry-based learning has revealed several important benefits and outcomes:

  • Improved Attitude Toward Science

    Students who experience an inquiry approach (rather than traditional approaches) express improved attitude toward science and interest in science careers and report "feeling like a scientist."1 These findings are significant because students who show an interest in science are more likely to study science and choose a scientific career.

  • Develops Science Process Skills and an Understanding of the Nature of Science

    Students experience inquiry-based learning in their science classes engage in the processes and procedures important for scientific work, developing the scientific process skills.2 With its emphasis on experience, questioning, searching for evidence, analysis, interpretation, and communication of results (explanation), inquiry learning develops the skills utilized by scientists in their careers. Students construct scientific explanations, realize the existence of experimental errors, view experimental data as evidence to support their claims, and develop richer understanding about the nature of scientific questions.3

  • Deepens Understanding of Science Concepts

    A diverse and wide body of research suggests that inquiry-based approaches to learning, which encourage students to directly engage with the subject matter by asking questions, developing hypothesis, and conducting experiments, promote student achievement in science4 and has a positive impact on students' understanding of scientific concepts.5

1 Dillivan, K.D. & Dillivan, M. (2014 February). Student Interest in STEM Disciplines: Results from a Summer Day Camp. Journal of Extension, Research In Brief 52 (1) https://joe.org/joe/2014february/rb5.php; Selim, M.A. & Shrigley, R. L. (1983). The group dynamics approach: A sociopsychological approach for testing the effect of discovery and expository teaching on the science achievement and attitude of young Egyptian students. Journal of Research of Science Teaching, 20(3), pp.213-224. https://doi.org/10.1002/tea.3660200305; Gibson, H. L. (1998). Case studies of an inquiry-based science programs' impact on students' attitudes towards science and interest in science careers. ERIC document reproduction service no. ED 417 980; Gibson, H. L., & Chase, C. (2002). Longitudinal impact of an inquiry-based science program on middle school students' attitudes toward science. Science Education, 86(5), 693-705.

2Simsek, P. & Kabapmar, F. (2010). The effects of inquiry-based learning on elementary students' conceptual understanding of matter, scientific process skills and science attitudes Procedia Social and Behavioral Sciences (2) 1190-1194; Skelton, P., Seevers, B., Dormody,T., & Hodnett, F. (2012 July). A Conceptual Process Model for Improving Youth Science Comprehension Article. Journal of Extension, 50(3).

3Wu, H. K. & Wu, C. L. Exploring the Development of Fifth Graders' Practical Epistemologies and Explanation Skills in Inquiry-Based Learning Classrooms. Res Sci Educ 41, 319-340 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11165-010-9167-4.

4Chang, C. & Mao, S. (1998). The Effects of an Inquiry-Based Instructional Method on Earth Science Students' Achievement. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the National Association for Research in Science Teaching (71st, San Diego, CA, April 19-22).

5 Chang, C. & Mao, S. (1998). The Effects of an Inquiry-Based Instructional Method on Earth Science Students' Achievement. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the National Association for Research in Science Teaching (71st, San Diego, CA, April 19-22); Scott, D. & Friesen, S. (2013). Inquiry-Based Learning: A Review of the Research Literature. Alberta Education. 1. 1-29; Simsek, P. & Kabapmar, F. (2010). The effects of inquiry-based learning on elementary students' conceptual understanding of matter, scientific process skills and science attitudes Procedia Social and Behavioral Sciences (2) 1190-1194; Skelton, P., Seevers, B., Dormody,T., & Hodnett, F. (2012 July). A Conceptual Process Model for Improving Youth Science Comprehension Article. Journal of Extension, 50(3); Wu, H. K. & Wu, C. L. Exploring the Development of Fifth Graders' Practical Epistemologies and Explanation Skills in Inquiry-Based Learning Classrooms. Res Sci Educ 41, 319-340 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11165-010-9167-4.

Why Inquiry-Based Learning and Teaching?

Today's students live, learn and work in a world characterized by increasing diversity and social, economic, and environmental issues that they did not cause but which are theirs to solve. Accelerating technological advances make the world even more complex. Jobs of the future are unknowable and unpredictable. "In many industries and countries, the most in-demand occupations or specialties did not exist 10 or even five years ago."1 A subsequent 2018 report projected "workers lacking appropriate skills . . . may see their wages and job quality suppressed by technology steadily eroding the value of their job, as it encroaches on the tasks required to perform it."2

To flourish in twenty-first century life and work and adapt to an ever-changing landscape requires competencies in the areas of creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, communication and complex problem-solving.3

Helping teachers to design experiences that develop the "twenty-first century competencies" and thus enable "deeper learning" for all students is the instructional challenge for schools and it is a matter of equity and justice for students.4 Fortunately, inquiry-based learning and other learner-centered pedagogies have proved productive in this area.

Introducing inquiry into the science classroom is especially valuable. By learning science through inquiry, students become scientists as they explore scientific phenomena and engage in the practices of science.

1World Economic Forum (2016, January). The future of jobs: Employment, skills and workforce strategy for the fourth industrial revolution. Global Challenge Insight Report. Geneva, Switzerland

2World Economic Forum (2018). The future of jobs report. Global Challenge Insight Report. Geneva, Switzerland.

3National Research Council (2012), Committee on Defining Deeper Learning and 21st Century Skills, Education for Life and Work: Developing Transferrable Knowledge and Skills in the 21st Century. By J. W. Pellegrino and M. L. Hilton. Washington, D.C: National Academies Press; The Quality Assurance Commons for Higher and Post-Secondary Education (2020, March). Graduate profile. Retrieved from https://theqacommons.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Graduate-Profile-2020.pdf

4Darling-Hammond, L., Oakes, J. et al (2019). Preparing teachers for deeper learning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Students who experience inquiry learning and engage in learning explorations have improved attitudes toward science, improved abilities to utilize science practices and processes to identify and explain physical phenomena, and develop a better understanding of science concepts. (Hover on the heading for more information.) Given these benefits, we propose professional development in five (5) areas which we consider a foundation for learning to engage students in learning explorations (inquiry learning).

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We are a scientist and science educator. We share a commitment to inquiry of the natural world as an instructional approach to attract, retain, and educate k-12 students in science. In our work with teachers, we utilize inquiry to enhance teachers' knowledge of scientific phenomena and develop their skills to engage k-12 students in inquiry learning experiences that reflect what scientists do.

Contact us to start making science fun again and to engage your teachers in strategies where both they and their students will better understand how we learn and the principles that govern our world.

See our StudentWorldTeacher site for more information about the work that we have done together.

Dr. Fiona Hughes-McDonnell, Ed.D. | Dr. David Burgess, Ph.D.

Serving Southern New Hampshire and Northern Massachusetts

Dr. Fiona Hughes-McDonnell, Ed.D. | Dr. David Burgess, Ph.D.

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