The Real Meaning of Inquiry: A parent’s story

Inquiry is always on my mind as I see its effectiveness again and again and again. Thanks Edna for your insightful, informative post recently about “10 Ways to Make Learning Meaningful.”

It’s perfect, and perfect timing as I muse about this.

My daughter came home last night full of excitement about her Math class. She’s in 9th grade and taking extended Math this year. She’s not a huge fan of Math but we encouraged her to take extended Math to challenge herself, and for the beginning of this year, she’s been stressed. We almost thought we had made the wrong decision. She had missed out on a lot of concepts last year, and my husband (a Math teacher) played catch up with her at home at the beginning of the year.

She had a “test” yesterday about logarithms and patterns. She went into it thinking she would fail and came home last night beaming. I think I got it, she said. She then proceeded to tell us about the assessment which asked the students to find patterns to attempt to figure out a little bit about how logarithms worked. “Our teacher hadn’t told us anything about them,” my daughter said. “We had to figure it out ourselves.” She smiled and said, “I figured out the pattern. I’ll show you. I think I know what logarithms are now.”

She then went to her whiteboard and drew out her perfect understanding, chatting along the way about her thinking. Through this one exercise of inquiry, my daughter had gone through the different stages in the learning challenge and come out the other side. It was eye opening, jaw-dropping, all of those cliche phrases.

Her teacher is good, and it’s the first time my daughter is showing some Eureka moments in Math. Constructing meaning in her Math class has helped her grown as a learner. Kudos to a great Math teacher. Kudos to inquiry. I need to continue to bring inquiry into the classroom. It’s such a powerful tool.

From James Nottingham’s Learning Pit