Tuesday, January 13, 2015

Guided Inquiry Learning

This strategy is one used to spice up the traditional avenues of "research and report" used when gathering and sharing historical background information by which to interpret literature of the time period and how it informed and was received by the people.
Guided Inquiry Learning is learning-centered, rather than product-centered (there is not an end "report" or "paper").  It is designed with intention, driven by students' authentic questions to get at deeper understanding.  GIL recognizes the emotional side of learning and promotes self-driven research practices.  
I used this strategy in my British Literature and Composition class when studying The Middle Ages, medieval history, which informs our understanding of medieval ballads, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the stories of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, and, to a lesser degree, the setting and nobility practices in Shakespeare's Macbeth.  Many of these works are about and written for the common, everyday people of the time period, and, therefore, our research tended more to lives of the people.  Thus, guided inquiry learning led us to orchestrating our own class-wide "game of life" with a middle ages twist!
I began by checking out as many different books as possible from local libraries about the medieval time period.  Students generated questions they had about the time period, and then were divided into groups to research their own aspect of the time period. 
The groups included:
1.  Careers-- charged with researching a variety of jobs held by each sex in both peasantry class 
2.  Marriage and Weddings-- charged with researching the wedding and marriage customs of the medieval time period and performing an artistic aspect of the ceremony or festival (ex. students showed the class how to do a dance, and one group even prepared a traditional dessert!)
3.  Housing-- charged with researching the living quarters and housing options of peasantry and nobility in medieval times
4.  Lives of the children-- charged with researching the lives of children at this time period and teaching classmates a game they might play, how they heard stories
5.  Valuables-- charged with researching items of currency and trade commonly valued in the medieval time period by peasantry or nobility
6. "Chance"-- charged with researching mishaps, misfortunes, and fortunate circumstances one might encounter as a member of the nobility or peasantry related to other categories

Then, we pieced this info. together into an interactive game (modeled loosely after the board game of Life) and students were able to "play" the game in teams, and learn about the opposite class they had researched.  It was a fun learning experience that the entire class had a stake in and the students felt they learned a lot about the time period we were studying.  This learning was evident in their writings and verbal interpretations of medieval literature that followed.

Guided Inquiry Design is not a new idea, but it was given further merit and explanation by “Making the Shift from Traditional Research Assignments to Guiding Inquiry Learning” by Leslie Maniotes and Carol Kuhlthau in Knowledge Quest, November/December 2014 (Vol. 43, #2, p. 8-17),
http://www.ala.org/aasl/kq/novdec14.  Colleen shared this via email on 12/2/14.