This week has been a great one for me personally of exploring new inquiry strategies, with Trevor MacKenzie’s visit to our class as well as my Cross-Curricular Inquiry Strategies course.

In Cross-Curricular Inquiry Strategies we’ve talked a fair bit about Trevor MacKenzie’s work and his books, so it was great to “meet” him over Zoom and have a chance to hear about his work and perspectives directly. Trevor was such an engaging speaker and I felt like his teaching ethos really comes through in his presenting. In one 60 minute presentation he showed so much kindness, empathy, and care for each of our personal experiences and responses to the material he was sharing so I can imagine that being in his class as a high-school student would be such a warm and nurturing experience. He clearly practices what he preaches in terms of inquiry-based and student-centred learning so it was great to have a sense of what that looks like.

We’ve had some fascinating examples of schools who are taking Inquiry-based learning to fantastic depths in the PSII and High-Tech High, but what I love about Trevor’s work is that he shows how inquiry strategies can be used in the classrooms of the public school system. This is something that has puzzled me about inquiry from the beginning — the PSII or High-tech High look amazing, but how can we really use inquiry when we get a job in a traditional public school? I think Trevor has so much to offer in this area.

The other discovery this week for me that was hugely influential in my quest for practical inquiry strategies is Harvard’s Project Zero, particularly their list of “thinking routines”: http://www.pz.harvard.edu/thinking-routines

The goal of these thinking routines is to help make students’ thinking visible, and most of them incorporate some level of inquiry to greater or lesser degrees. The thinking routines are ways to get students thinking out loud, on paper, and creatively, making thinking visible to aid in formative assessment and reflexive teaching. I’ve really enjoyed looking through the Project Zero Thinking Routines and I foresee them being an extremely useful set of resources for lesson planning, formative assessment, and weaving inquiry into the curriculum.