Week 3 Reflection Blog

What new insights have you developed? Has anything changed? Are there any "burning questions" that you feel need to be answered?

My thoughts of inquiry based learning has greatly developed over the past few weeks.  My perspective is hard to put into words.  After everything I have read the last few weeks, I think I deep down knew already but I didn't fully understand.  I also discovered that sometimes, I feel that the structure of our school system sometimes doesn't support this type of learning.  I would LOVE to do inquiry based learning more often.  I noticed while writing the paper last week that SKILLS are needed for college and the work force, not necessarily content knowledge.  I have talked to friends of mine that teach at the college level and one of the things that I hear from them are that the students entering college, just don't have the skills to be successful at their level.  They don't know how to be responsible or communicate effectively.  I feel like a failure as a high school teacher at that point.  I know it isn't me necessarily but I understand that something in the public education system needs to be fixed. 

Students need to develop important skills in high school, but the time needed to do more of it just isn't there. I tell my friends that I don't even get to teach much until October because of the amount of testing I need to do in September.  Between SLO pre tests, CDT testing, AR Testing, and GRADE testing, my students are completely burned out and this testing goes on and off though out the school year.  There are numerous disruptions that teachers have to deal with on a regular basis. (SURPRISE ASSEMBLY!!!). It is very difficult for me to plan for these lessons and when I need to get XYZ done before the final, it proves difficult.  Even though it is difficult, I learned that I HAVE to attempt a few well thought out, inquiry based learning lessons for each unit and try to do the best that I can with it.  I naturally include questioning through out my lessons, but I would love to do more lessons that are more student lead. Students have much more authentic learning when they are free to conduct their own investigations and figure out the answers themselves.  

Reading the reports on the skills needed for this Century and watching the inquiry based lessons really opened my eyes to HOW important these skills are.  I am going to do my best to incorporate longer inquiry based lessons into my units. I just wish I had more planning time and classroom time to do it more effectively.  My burning question is how to incorporate more of inquiry based lessons without sacrificing curriculum.