Webinar Review: Inquiry Learning and Empowering Students

To follow up on my last post, I viewed a recent webinar featuring David Truss, a vice principal. In it, he discussed strategies to transform classrooms through technology. David opened the webinar with the question, “How will you transform your classroom into an inquiry-driven, collaborative, and engaging learning environment?” As a future ESOL teacher, I understand the importance of authentic communicative tasks for effective language acquisition, but I had no idea how to implement inquiry-driven collaborative learning without stepping aside and giving full control to the students. However, David managed to clear up some of my previous concerns about technology in the classroom by quoting Seth Godin: “A car is not merely a faster horse. And email is not a faster fax… play a new game, not the older game but faster.” He used this quote to argue that transferring information to more advanced media is not enough for transformative learning to occur. He recalled having to trace maps from an atlas and was horrified to hear of schoolchildren today having to trace shapes from computer screens. Clearly, technology should be more than just flair.

David identified seven ways to transform classrooms with technology: inquiry, voice, audience, community, leadership, play and networks. Through inquiry, students come up with their own questions to investigate and their teachers modify instruction accordingly. The students collaborate with their teachers, community members and each other to come up with meaningful answers. This can be done through a wiki, for instance. Through collaboration inside and outside of class, teachers establish a sense of community. Another strategy is for students to use recording devices to share their work and prepare for presentations. This is particularly useful for English learners to build up their confidence in their speaking skills. Audience is important as well. In an authentic learning task, students have an audience other than their teacher and classmates in mind. They are motivated to attract a wider audience through quality writing.

I am only skeptical about leadership and play. David believes that good teachers give every student a chance to lead. However, the politically incorrect reality is that the economy needs both leaders and followers. That being said, there's no reason teachers can't encourage everyone to explore their leadership potential. He also states that opportunities for play encourage discovery and learning through mistakes, because games provide an ideal level of challenge. That may be so, but teaching through games is a tricky business. The days of children signing up to play Oregon Trail in class by themselves are a good example of what not to do.

David's idea of networks effectively sums up the previous six ways of using technology in the classroom. Connectivism connects learning networks both online and off. This is modeled after the brain. One of the best things about technology is that it enables all students to meet the learning outcomes. Even someone who struggles with writing can still demonstrate their knowledge through other means such as videos or podcasts. Again, this is a good way to modify assessment for English learners.

Going back to David's original question: attaining the learning outcomes of my course will enable me to transform my future classroom into an inquiry-driven, collaborative, and engaging learning environment. I hope to use various technologies to enhance instruction and my students' technological literacy. I will strive to differentiate instruction in doing so. Looking back at my prior experiences as an EFL teacher in Spain and an ESOL tutor in New Hampshire, I realize that I haven't done this enough. While I modified my instructional and assesment expectations for each student, I seldom got them to collaborate. In a recent course I took, I learned some strategies to accomplish this. For example, one of the group projects recommended by the developers of The SIOP (Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol) Model is a fundraiser on eBay. Through this, classmates will work together and practice their language skills of speaking, listening, reading and writing. Instead of being passive recipients of the English language, my students will learn it the way they were meant to.