I was in a planning meeting for the School of the Future today (we collaborate often… I know SLA is better for it… I hope SoF is as well…) and we were talking about what inquiry-based curriculum looks like. Lots of people talk about it, but if we are truly to start with the student questions… how do we then ensure that they get the skills they’re going to need to acquire?

We came up with the metaphor of the hour-glass… here’s a really lousy image to start the process of explaining what I mean:

(Hey, I said it was a lousy image)

To wit… if we start with the generative topic process where we start with a very broad-based essential question. Then the kids generate all the questions that relate to that question… all the things they may ask. Then, the students and teachers work together to organize those questions into some sort of taxonomy that makes sense. This allows the students to then choose what questions they want to work with…

This starts the first phase of research… researching the topics of interest within their questions so that they could then create an informed thesis / hypothesis. This is a narrowing process… it’s where you go from the big open-ended questions to informed questions to define further study.

The expansion happens as students then start that study to answer that question. This where the teachers have to have a well-defined set of benchmarks and such to define the scope of the project (especially if this is an interdisciplinary project), but now the student research is focused on dealing with the hypothesis and the ramifications of the conclusions they draw. And that last piece is an important piece of the puzzle, because as we ask our students to look at the real-world ramifications of the work that they do… and we ask them to create action plans that stem from the work that they do, that’s where what starts as a question ends with students becoming active participants in society.

And shouldn’t that be the end of the inquiry process?

Thoughts and comments on this very broadly defined metaphor are very much welcome. This is, for me, a concept that was born around a table on U. Penn’s campus today. It feels like a good way to look at the process, but it certainly needs to be problematized.