I have completed some brief inquiry-based activities but I want to incorporate more.  I am very interested in PBL and would like to incorporate more open-ended inquiry projects with my students.  Sometimes it is difficult to fit everything in with special schedules, assemblies, state testing, etc. but this year will be a game changer.  If I can't do many of my standard labs and activities I have some more flexibility to incorporate some new activities.  Since my students are at a private school, they live in very different areas in our community so if they can collect some data in their own yards, we could have quite an interesting sample.  I am a little nervous about the less structured learning environment but from this course I learned that it isn't really unstructured, just a different style of teaching than what I am used to.

In my experience with secondary-school students in international schools, one of the most challenging experiences students have are:

• honing in on their own researchable question to inquire: I like to use "I notice that..." (with the older kids, rather than the "I wonder...", which seems to work better with younger students); because it already has some inherent thoughts about generalizations, perspectives, relationships, potential cause-and-effect directionality, assumptions, etc. --> all of which is great fodder for testing and the inquiry process!
• giving meaningful peer feedback: the 1st step I want to support students with is recognizing their own value as a giver of ideas, thoughts, perspectives and voice, and how that fits in with peer feedback.  The 2nd step is showing that meaningful feedback is thoughtful, respectful and helps to also shape the reviewers own way of thinking (since peer reviewing techniques is a form of assessment as learning, it works in both directions: for the reviewer and the reviewee).  I use various rubrics, checklists or templates with varying degrees of detail (depending on the needs of the students), and tools/strategies to make the review process suit the type of project: (1) use of sticky notes, colour-coded highlighters, etc. for printed materials needing feedback; (2) "kaizena" or other voice-recording add-on tools directly commenting in Googledocs; (3) color-coded written comment functions in PDFs or Googledocs.  The audience and strategy for sharing also varies based on the requirements of the project: peers in different grades, based on interest, even working in the wider teaching, parent and staff groups within the school, and on occasion, with the wider local and global communities.

Time is always an issue when participating in inquiry based activities. I think, as teachers we tend to  think of projects that  fit into shorter periods of time rather than longer projects. Therefore, I am attempting to make the inquiry based projects my students work on last for an entire quarter. This way students have the time to  delve into each step of the investigation and can really dig deep into their investigations.  As I am not in a regular ed classroom, but rather supplementing gifted students learning, I have the flexibility to make this happen. This is not a privilege all teacher have.  If a project continues for a longer time it becomes easier to incorporate the ELA and mathematical standards that are taught during the 9 week period. too often I believe we segment education into separate categories rather than thinking of it as a holistic entity. Real world application projects that students will encounter during their adult working life are often slated to take months  rather than weeks. I think that if we are able to incorporate these kinds of tasks within our schools, we offer students opportunities to succeed in their adult life.

I work primarily with the homeschool community and grading/assessment has never been part of my program because we are more of an enrichment/extracurricular opportunity for families. I would say my biggest hurdle with implementing this into my program would be time. We only meet 2-3 times a month for 4 hrs at a time, only about 45 minutes of that time is for our core lesson. My birding club only meets 1 time a month so again time is a huge factor.

I would say that some of my challenges with inquiry-based activities are how to measure the learning process and ensure students are learning for themselves when they are part of a small group, rather than letting others take over and do the work. I can see that a whole project rubric is as valuable as the final product rubric, to help guide students through each step of the process and to help me, as a teacher, assess each student. Clearly defined instructions established through discovery and discussion will also help me guide these activities. I need to break it all into smaller bites, and go one step at a time to ensure that all students are able to grow in the experience. I agree with Amy that time is a factor, so tying in Math and ELA will help, but we also run on a curriculum map, so we lose some flexibility with teaching. This is my first year in a Florida 2nd grade classroom, so I'll have to see how I can work this in. I may try to start a Science club this year, and/or use our virtual platform to involve students more.

The biggest challenge I face every year when leading inquiry based activities in school is the lack of time.  In public schools, there is so much pressure to "cover material" and get through so many science units (not to mention all the other subjects).  I never feel like I do it justice.  I don't really have a solution for this problem, but I just continue to struggle with it each year.

One of the challenges I have faced in leading and assessing inquiry based activities has been interference by outside forces and a school community that does not see the value of inquiry based investigations to the extent that it hinders the work the students try to do. Lack of support of the school administration and what I call just a disrespect for student efforts has been a theme of challenge in just about every effort I have made to do projects beyond the classroom related to natural science. Examples include planting new tree seedlings for several years in areas around the school and in the school garden that are dug up by the custodian and knocked down by neighborhood residences.  Bird seed experiments set on an outside ledge under my classroom window with  signs that clearly identified them as  student experiments that were removed by the custodian. Rain water collection bottles destroyed and knocked down by other students. No acknowledgement or interest when my class was selected to receive a grant to participate in a STEM program where we did a bird study. I discussed these challenges with custodial and administration with no success and finally just limited my activities to ones that could be done in the classroom. Because of this I felt that my students who live in an urban environment and had very little opportunity to engage with nature were being stifled by the very school that is supposed to support their learning. My suggestion is if you have no support with doing inquiry based work with students don't give up. Find a way to bring it into the classroom despite ignorance in your school community. Ultimately it is for the greater good of the students.

When teaching a lesson on Melting and Freezing points, I led an experiment on the fastest way to get ice to melt without using more water.  I did not call it an inquiry-based activity, but my classes questioned, predicted and then followed through with the activity.  One cup was ice alone, another cup had ice and table salt, and a third cup changed in each class as per predictions and class votes. They measured the amount of liquid water appeared in each cup every two minutes for twenty minutes.   Even after much thought and discussion of the procedures, reviewing the use and reading of a ruler, and even pre-labeling cup 1, cup 2 and cup 3, I still faced challenges.  Some of the challenges I faced were supporting all of the needs of my students.  On that particular day, my aide in three classes was out sick without a substitute.  In focusing on my attention on making sure all students received their supplies to get started, I was not able to support all of the needs within each class.  Some students just dumped everything in one cup, some students were unable to read a ruler, etc.  The students still had a fun time and enjoyed themselves.  Then I brought the students who were unable to complete the lab in at another time for a make-up lab.

I have not led any major inquiry based activities, though I have led some smaller ones, like looking at why snow is white, and the best amount of water for a seedling. I think one challenge for me is language -- "I wonder" boards are very open-ended, and I am teaching students who are new to school and to English. I often find myself relying on predictions rather than more open-ended wondering. Another challenge is modelling what strong inquiry looks like. I also think that engagement will be a challenge -- I need to find high-engagement, meaningful opportunities for students to base their wonderings on.

I have not led any inquiry-based activities in my classroom.  Since I have not led or assessed these types of activities I will reflect on some challenges that I think I would face.  In many of the articles that I have read and from prior experience with how children think, I believe students will learn best when they are the ones creating the questions, designing the experiments and investigations, and collecting the data.  I teach six and seven year old students in my first grade class.  Since inquiry-based activities would be new them, I anticipate some confidence issues with students and some who just want me to tell them how to do everything.  It will be challenging for me to step back.  While I will still be modeling my expectations, giving positive encouragement and feedback, and supporting them through the process, I will need to hold off to let this be their investigation and discovery.  This inquiry process is developed over time and with much practice.  I will need to remind myself that time, patience, and flexibility are essential in order for this process to be successful.  Teaching my students how to do peer and self assessments would be a great component to add to this process.  I also feel that since I've typically done only summative assessments with first graders in science that moving to dynamic assessment would be very beneficial for them.  This would give them the opportunity to make adjustments to their project based on feedback from myself and their classmates.  While all these suggestions are great, my biggest challenge in all of this will be the time that it will take to teach, model, coach, and provide practice opportunities to develop this new way of thinking.

I have found greatest success in inquiry-based instruction when I give students the opportunity to ask their own questions.  Students begin to have ownership of the project and become the “experts” on their topic when they are researching and developing an experiment on a topic that interests them.  It ceases to be so much an assignment as something that they enjoy doing.  These are the students who show up at the end of the day to have more time in the lab to work on their project or more time with the computers for research.  If I dominate the areas of inquiry, students tend to shut down and approach the project as something that must be completed for the sake of the grade. I have rubrics to be most helpful when assessing student projects.  Rubrics communicate to all students up front the expectations for the projects.  I agreed with the instructor in the reading in that rubrics tend to need adjusting over time.  Just when I think I have worked out all the issues, something else arises during the grading of projects that I did not address in the rubric.  I adjust rubrics as needed to keep them current for the projects.

Leading an inquiry-based activity is something we haven't done at this point, formally. In presenting community programs, I think one of the main challenges would be introducing the inquiry style itself, as it can take time for children (or adults) to adapt to this style of learning. Since we aren't yet doing any citizen science projects, attendees at our programs come expecting to be given facts and information, not necessarily to be active learners/participants. A way we could tackle this would be to present that the program will be interactive to begin with, as they will know the content (what the program is about) ahead of time and they could even begin to think of questions they may have or answers to questions they think we may have for them, this could be beneficial as those who attend our programs generally are doing so because they already have some sort of interest already in the topic.

I have not yet lead an inquiry-based activity in the classroom, but one of the challenges I would imagine educators face is determining what level of 'interference' or 'prompting' by the educator is required. I think I would struggle to do a more "open-ended" inquiry activity with the students, as it is the tendency of an educator to be helpful and guide them, but I also know it is important to allow students to figure out things in their own way and make mistakes too. I would also think another challenge that would come with inquiry-based activities is determining the 'right' way to assess the learning, which would mean that the learning objectives need to be really clear or else it may be challenging to assess what the students are learning.

Due to time constraints with my groups of students, I have led data gathering, as in a citizen science project - Great Backyard Bird Count- but have not had an opportunity to lead a full blown inquiry. I believe one of the challenges for classroom teachers would be the amount of time dedicated to integrating subject matter from several disciplines to meet state learning standards. Experienced teachers may see those connections more readily but still find it quite a bit of prep. I like the idea of collaboration with other teachers in your school to review some of the skills students must have to do an effective inquiry.

In the fall semester, I started a new Earth & Space Science course that focused on project-based learning (PBL). In my mind, PBL is very much inquiry based. What I've learned is similar to what Mr. Kahler experienced in his citizen-science project. One of the biggest challenges, after defining the phenomena and driving question, is working with students to develop their own research questions. I had to spend 2 entire class periods and then continue to touch on it throughout the project about how to ask good questions that focus on the What? How? and the Why?. After that, I had a media specialist come in the class and talk about how to conduct research, avoid plagiarism, and cite sources. Again, these were topics that continuously needed to be re-visited throughout the project.  You can't talk about these once and then assume that students understand their importance and know how to handle them appropriately.

I have not yet led an inquiry-based activity. I would think a challenge would be to help those kids that are struggling to keep up with the class and not give up.