When I first heard about using inquiry as a teaching method I wanted to try it right away because it seemed like a good way to get kids fully engaged in their learning. My first run at it was with fourth-graders. The results were about what they should have been considering I did very little teaching with the project. As I recall, some of the kids managed to assemble a completed report with a colorful display, and most of the rest had projects that I stored in a closet for the rest of the year. The kids had fun, but I don’t think they (or I) learned very much from doing that first inquiry.

I recognized there was probably more to generating authentic questions than simply having students complete a KWL chart. Since June, 2005, I’ve been involved in a professional development course for science education sponsored by The Alaska Science Consortium where I was introduced to the Learning Cycle Model. I can’t go into much detail on the Learning Cycle Model right here, but I want to say that I believe the issue of question-asking is relevant to teachers at every level, in every academic discipline.

The learning cycle starts with a bit called the “Gear Up,” which is usually a quick little demonstration to get everyone’s attention and to assess students’ knowledge and preconceptions about the concept you want to teach. The Gear Up is a springboard for question-generation. Just about anything can be a gear-up: A story, a diagram, a discussion, or a demonstration. Many gear-ups present students with a problem. These are sometimes called discrepant events because they involve an observation of a phenomena that turns out other than how you’d expect, and a state of cognitive dissonance is induced. You know when you hit the mark with students because their reaction is something like, “Wait a minute. Let me try that.”

When a discrepant event doesn’t work out, the students don’t note any discrepancy. This might happen if students haven’t thought about whatever is being explored, and therfore don’t have any preconceptions. They accept the results at face value and think, “So?” When that happens, the point of the “surprising” demonstration is missed. To optimize the impact of discrepant events, it can be helpful to use a predict-observe-explain approach. The predicting process helps to activate background knowledge before the demonstration begins, which primes the students’ expectations. One technique I’ve tried is to poll the class and record the predictions with tally marks on the board.

Once the Gear up has done its job, we move on to Exploration, and ultimately, to Application. Along the way, there are different types of questions that teachers need to be aware of. To begin with, there are the questions that the students ask, and there are the questions posed by teachers. We need to think about both. Teachers should recognize the difference between questions that simply elicit information, and questions that initiate investigation. Questions that begin with “Why” are most likely information-seeking, and require an explanation for an answer. Minimally, they can be answered with just one word. Questions that invite inquiry might begin with “How does,” or “What if.” In any case, it’s worthwhile to think about the purpose that the questions we ask will serve. We ask questions that will motivate discussions, assess prior knowledge or current progress, challenge students’ thinking, or prompt them for an answer.

When students begin to generate questions, we can help them to recognize which would be the most productive to pursue. Good questions lead students to find solutions to a problem. To answer them students need to seek new information and to formulate a plan of action. Teachers can help guide a student’s activity by refining or rewording a question to give it more focus. Students eventually learn to recognize which questions can be easily answered, which questions require basic research for information, and which will lend themselves to scientific testing.

Good questions are the foundation of all creative effort. They are vehicles for our intellectual growth. It doesn’t matter whether we are doing science, math, art, writing an essay, writing a poem, reading a book, or making a blog entry. The questions we ask ourselves play a crucial part in determining the nature of our inquiry, and without good questions our answers won’t matter.