Strategies

The strategies for building teachers' confidence and competence with inquiry and schoolyards all revolve around direct engagement in a supportive atmosphere that fosters experimentation, reflection and growth. In this section we describe specific strategies for involving teachers in schoolyard inquiry:

• Create a supportive environment for inquiry.
• Have teachers do their own inquiries.
• Build teachers' research and inquiry skills.

Strategies described elsewhere - Teaching Ecology and Natural History, Chapter 4, and Reflection, Chapter 5, and Providing Useful Resources, Chapter 7, - also contribute to the goal of fostering teacher comfort and competence with inquiry.

Create a Supportive Environment for Inquiry

Create a supportive environment where teachers feel safe to question, hypothesize, experiment, stretch their minds, fail and succeed. An atmosphere of experimentation and reflection, where there is a shared sense of professional exploration, will go a long way towards helping teachers become inquirers. Perhaps most importantly for novice scientists, emphasize that is it not only OK to not know the answer, but that science is all about this very process of pursuing questions for which the answer is not known. Where would we be without someone saying, "I don't know?"

As teachers interact with practicing scientists that are involved in the SYE Institute as leaders or resource people, they should see first-hand how scientists think about the natural world, and how they generate and answer research questions. If done in a supportive way, the parallel between the scientist's thinking and the teacher's learner should help encourage inquiry.

Set positive examples of inquiry skills and dispositions by your own behavior. Show curiosity, care and excitement in observing patterns and puzzles outside, critical thinking in asking and evaluating questions, tenacity in the face of confusion and adversity, guarded skepticism when interpreting results, and the unbounded enthusiasm for increased understanding that all students of science share.

Creating a safe place for inquiry revolves around more than just the leaders' behavior and attitudes. The entire group of teachers can work together to build this safe and stimulating atmosphere. Have the teachers work in a variety of cooperative learning situations to foster positive group dynamics. These, too, are techniques the teachers will use with their students, and many already are quite adept at forming groups and nurturing various kinds of student cooperative learning. Assign the teachers to teams for projects, have them do peer review, do pair-wise exchange of rough drafts of inquiry plans for partner feedback, etc.



Have Teachers Do Their Own Inquiries on Their Own Schoolyards

Open Inquiry in the Schoolyard

Open inquiry - where learners frame their own questions based on their ideas about and observations of the world around them, and then go on to design and carry-out their own investigations - is a useful teaching strategy for many learners. Student ownership and motivation can be extremely high as they probe mysteries that they define and scope out. As they carry out their inquiries, learners taste the same thrill and challenge faced by scientists in directing their research. However, open inquiry can be challenging, both for the facilitators and the participants.

Challenges for Open Inquiry

Participants:

Don't know how to ask questions. Are inhibited to write down "bad" questions. Need to know what things are before they write down questions. Are not used to observing and wondering. Are intimidated by experts in their group (leaders, other teachers who "know" more). Lapse into asking questions that aren't ecological. Think from their students' perspectives rather than their own.

Facilitators/Leaders:

Relinquish control. Manage diverse projects. Hold back their own observations, questions, hypotheses. Interject wisdom from "the discipline."

Three Ways Open Inquiry was Facilitated in SYE Institutes

1. Open Inquiry to Kick-off a SYE Institute. On the first day of a SYE Institute, soon after introductions are made, proceed outside with a question-generating assignment (see SYE Activity - Quadrats & Questions. Teachers - working individually, in pairs with each other (only 2, not more) or paired with an ecologist - generate a free-form list of questions about a particular part of a schoolyard. The leaders give quiet encouragement and help the nature-shy people get started, but otherwise they step back and allow teachers a lot of space. An amazing wealth of questions is invariably generated in a very short time, even by novice inquirers (see sample lists of questions generated by two teachers, Zoe Burke and Mary Hayes from Ocean View School with the St. Luis Obispo, California SYEFEST.) The teachers then are directed to choose a question - from among their list or a new one - that they can answer, and then they actually design and carry out a study. Usually, this whole process takes the entire first day, and sometimes spills into the second day, with teachers making their final presentations of results the next morning. By the time they complete a study based on one of their questions, many participants already experience a turning point in their confidence as inquirers.

In the middle of this open inquiry activity, the leaders play a crucial role in guiding the selection of the research question to be pursued by each group. One option is to discuss various ways to categorize the different kinds of questions we ask and to consider what makes some better for investigation than others. Some leaders prefer to give participants specific guidelines ahead of time or at this point in the process, while others ask the participants to develop criteria for what makes a "good" question. The four criteria or guidelines for questions are:

"Four Criteria for Questions" developed by Peter Feinsinger and colleagues 1. Questions should be answerable within a reasonable time limit, which can be specified as part of the inquiry activity. Questions such as "how?", "which?", "how many?", and "where" are likely to be answerable. In contrast, "why?" questions, while often more beguiling (and initially more natural to adults and schoolchildren alike), are rarely answerable directly through hands-on investigation. Instead, "why?" questions constitute the core of the reflection phase; they provide 'BIG PICTURE' motivation for answerable questions and are the key to generating additional inquiries (see Diagram of Inquiry). "Why?" questions often can be made answerable simply by dropping the "Why" but keeping the rest of the question. 2. Questions should be comparative, and the comparison should have some meaningful basis or general context involving (1) common sense and logic or (2) some prior inkling of general concepts leading one to expect the comparison to be of interest. A comparative question forces the inquirer to think about the rationale for framing it in that way (i.e., to specify the context in which the comparison is made) and leads to reflection (how do the results of the comparison relate to the general concept/context/chain of reasoning?). Non-comparative questions often are dead ends. Furthermore, even at the elementary school level a comparative question leads inquirers to think about study design, sampling, replication, the concept of a "fair test" - in short, the foundation for statistical inference. 3. Questions should be somewhat tantalizing; that is, they must involve neither an overly obvious, predetermined answer nor an overly tedious procedure. A question that otherwise complies with guidelines 1 and 2 could still be ineffective if (1) the answer is obvious or predictable at the outset, clearly signaling to the inquirers that they're just doing busy work; or (2) the answer is not obvious but the tedium of the data collecting necessary to answer the question far overwhelms the thrill for the chase and the potential for reflective learning. 4. Questions should avoid jargon and avoid any technology more sophisticated than materials commonly (and cheaply) accessible to school teachers and small children - nothing more sophisticated than paper, pencils, rulers, kitchen pots and pans and strainers, cheap fabric, string, rubber bands and markers. Forceps and magnifiers are borderline. Examples of scientific jargon not encouraged include Latin names of organisms and formal terms from ecological science (e.g., niche, eutrophication). If the question cannot be expressed in everyday language, it might not be worth pursuing.

 

A scheme that shows how these guidelines relate to a simple model of the inquiry process is included, too, in the "Designing Good Investigations" table below.

Doing open inquiry on the first day of a SYE Institute doesn't necessarily have to lead to actual investigations. Just by encouraging open questioning, and then discussing the various kinds of questions generated, teachers begin to look at the schoolyard different and get a new glimpse of doing science. See also The Question Posing Activity devised by the Oxford Institute for Environmental Education.

For a wonderful example of how one SYEFEST teacher built on her experience with open inquiry and wove it into a unit with her fourth-graders, see the testimony given by Jude Curtin from her Millbrook SYEFEST experience.

2. Open Inquiry throughout a SYE Institute. In the Boston, Massachusetts SYEFEST, virtually every day provided some opportunity for teachers to do open inquiry. In only a few cases did teachers actually carry an investigation to fruition, but every day had student-directed exploration, questioning, observing, documenting, organizing, comparing and collaborating in the open-inquiry model.

In the Oxford SYESFEST, teachers visited a different schoolyard each day (and sometimes, two schoolyards in a single day) and they spent the first 30 minutes doing open exploration of the new site and recording their questions. This model focused teachers on a different ecology theme each day, thereby constraining the questioning to some extent reference to Ecology Framework in Appendix 4 - and example of the "type B - focused inquiry" in the Table of Inquiry. In some cases, discussions went beyond the questions to consider design of investigations, while in others, the list of questions became the entrée into further discussion of the big ideas involved in the theme and of the opportunities for teaching on that schoolyard.

This is a direct quote from the report written by the case study observer of the Boston site's work with open inquiry.

Guided inquiry can maximize student learning in the environment. Leaders either (1) provide a strong focus for observations and questions or (2) constrain students to use particular sites or tools; the latter is probably the most common form of inquiry teaching both in SYE Institutes and in schools. While open inquiry often was used to help teachers better understand the inquiry or research process, guided inquiries were chosen to develop specific content understanding at the same time it fosters understanding of science process.

More about the criteria for selecting guided inquiries in terms of intended content learning is discussed in Chapter 4. Here, simply consider:

• The range of big ideas you'd like teachers to learn something about
• a diversity of research methods, for example:
- carefully controlled, manipulative studies
- short- and long-term comparative studies
- environmental monitoring
- indoor studies using materials collected from the schoolyard
- studies with model systems or models
• Different strategies or approaches to "guiding" inquiry, to serve as models for teacher practice giving the question:
- giving the methods
- giving the site or sites to study

• Designing good investigations
• Hypothesis formulation and testing
• Random sampling
• Replication and sources of variation in ecological studies
• Identification of research organisms
• Sampling techniques for animals (insects, worms, small mammals, birds)
• Data analysis and interpretation
• Graphing and data presentation
• Coping with the vagaries of ecological studies, including incomplete information, zeros, "failures," missing numbers and surprises

Some ways for building teachers' skills in these areas include:

• Readings
• Mini-lectures by the Lead Ecologist, or by each other
• Mini-workshops in skills, such as data analysis or plant identification
• Peer review of research plans
• Assign teachers to write up a research project and provide feedback on their papers.
• Selection of inquiry activities that develop specific skills (for example, the Millbrook, New York, SYEFEST used the Dandelion Determination activity to build teachers' familiarity with sampling schemes)