Inquire Within, by Douglas Llewellyn is an introduction to inquiry-based science education. I’m reading it for a course I’m taking with the Alaska Science Consortium. The book provides background information on what inquiry is - and isn’t, and what it might look like in a science classroom. Llewellyn used the term cookbook science as a reference to science activities with pre-determined outcomes. I’d never heard the term before and it lodged in my imagination. Like a virus, it’s grown into a full-blown concept. My thinking about it has gone beyond science education. I’m using the word, ‘cookbook’ now as part of a new model I have for instructional decision-making. Llewellyn distinguished between four different approaches to teaching a lesson, each with varying levels of teacher control.

The hierarchy of control for instructional decision-making is as follows:

  • Demonstrations - the highest level of teacher control - privileges the teacher’s voice alone. Here the instructor gets to be the sage on the stage. Demonstrations are useful for providing a group of students with a commmon frame of reference, operationalizing a concept, and controlling the outcome of a procedure;
  • Procedural Activities - highly structured - generally provide students with a worksheet and questions that have been chosen by the teacher or textbook author. These are considered cookbook activities. Procedural activities give students a chance to do hands-on work, but mainly serve to confirm what is already known about a subject. Anyone who has ever been in a k-12 classroom, regardless of subject matter, is familiar with procedural activities;
  • Guided Inquiry - in which control of the lesson is shared, or negotiated - occurs when the teacher suggests possible investigations for students to conduct. Students plan the investigation and choose procedures that they believe will help them solve the problem or answer the question they are invesitgating. Guided inquiry lessons are appropriate for students who may not be familiar with inquiry-based learning processes. The teacher’s role for guided inquiry lessons is that of facilitator and guide, pointing the way and occasionally redirecting without providing answers, allowing students a chance to discover for themselves;
  • Open Inquiry - in which students initiate the investigation - allows students total control over selection of the question they will investigate, and the procedures they will use for their research. Teachers who want their students to engage in this form of inquiry learning will usually need to stimulate the students’ thinking by exposing them to some exploratory activity in which they are able to observe phenomena that arouse curiosity to learn more about a problem or situation. The teacher needs to problematize a topic so the students gain a sense of mission for their work. These sorts of lessons are generally more successful if students have had other experiences doing guided inquiry.

What strikes me as most interesting is that there appears to be a place for each form of lesson. Previously, I’ve been left with the impression that demonstrations and worksheets are somehow undesireable from a constructivist viewpoint. The hierarchy of control, though, suggests a rationale for using each form of lesson depending on the teacher’s goals and the needs of the students. Nonetheless, we far too often resort to the expedient of using worksheets and demonstrations to the exclusion of more constructive lesson designs. Many teachers never diverge from cookbook methodology. Teachers who rely soley on structured teacher manuals and prepackaged materials for lessons are engaging in what I’m calling cookbook education. Students are learning what school is about no matter what else we think we are teaching them. In first grade they learn that math means putting something after the equal sign. In third grade they learn that they must answer comprehension questions to show that they understand what a book is about. In fifth grade they learn that social studies is about answering the questions at the end of the chapter. In sixth grade they learn that science is about following directions for experiments and filling in a worksheet. If teachers never go beyond cookbook activities, students learn to expect that learning is about memorizing and practicing, and not about seeking and discovering. We can’t afford to exclusively rely on methods that are highly controlled or students will not learn to plan and revise their thinking. They won’t learn to think on their own. They won’t see themselves as being in control. We should also be exposing students to lesson designs from the inquiry end of the hierarchy, which encourages discovery. The goal is empowerment.

Teacher training has to lead us beyond the notion that hands-on learning alone is constructive. Hands-on learning is a starting point. What matters most is what we encourage students to do with the tools that we give them. The real activity is happening beyond our sight, in their imaginations. Our professional practice should encourage intellectual autonomy, not slavish imitation. The answer is not coercion but inspiration. Teachers who are looking for direction in this regard would do well by looking into Project CRISS. That isn’t the only solution, though. Information about literature circles, guided reading, and problem-centered math and science curricula are all there for us to begin forging new ways of doing business.

It isn’t easy, though. One of the main problems we have is in building consensus about which particular beliefs and practices constitute effective methodology. We need to start communicating with each other about what we’re doing and why it’s important.