Guided Inquiry
Overview
In guided inquiry, teachers scaffold student learning and help students use their own language for constructing knowledge by active listening and questioning. While exploring and investigating a problem, teachers guide students to talk through their thinking, which supports development of students' Critical Thinking and inquiry skills. Guidance can vary in specificity, frequency and duration, yet any guided inquiry tends to be better for learning than unguided inquiry, and most learners benefit from supports like worked examples. Guided inquiry can be effective for all ages, across domains, when adequate guidance is provided. What type and frequency of guidance is adequate will vary, depending on both the learners and their context. Guided inquiry in STEM can increase student engagement and interest and can be facilitated by technology, such as simulations, virtual laboratories, modeled environments, and even games. Technology-supported guided inquiry in STEM can support many aspects of learning, including learner Motivation, understanding, and Attention.
The teacher plays a crucial role in guided inquiry by determining what supports are needed, and raising students' awareness of how to use language as a tool for reasoning. Teachers can ask questions that provoke thinking and provide their own ideas for possible answers that stimulate further questions. Additionally, because asking questions elicits deeper thinking and can challenge previous thinking, inquiry has the potential to foster growth mindsets. Multilingual learners can benefit from engaging with content through multiple modalities in inquiry learning, building their background knowledge, and students with learning disabilities may demonstrate higher engagement, developing problem solving skills, through guided inquiry in an inclusive classroom.
Example: Use This Strategy in the Classroom
Starting at 0:50, watch how this high school teacher uses guided inquiry to promote Critical Literacy skills. By grounding their work in a big question, students must reason and answer the question from a variety of perspectives from the literature they are reading. At the end, students make a presentation about what they learned to younger students, modeling their thinking and learning as well as finding their voice in the process.
Design It into Your Product
Additional Resources
Additional examples, research, and professional development. These resources are possible representations of this strategy, not endorsements.
Factors Supported by this Strategy
More Instructional Approaches Strategies
Flipped learning is when the delivery of traditional content (i.e., lectures, videos) occurs outside of the classroom, allowing class time to be used for more active and application-based activities.
Multimodal teaching and learning provide opportunities for students to engage with the same content through different sensory modalities, such as visual, auditory and tactile.
Retrieval practice requires students to access information, or get information “out” from Long-term memory in order to support better retention and understanding.
A strengths-based approach is one where educators intentionally identify, communicate, and harness students' assets, across many aspects of the whole learner, in order to empower them to flourish.
Incorporating think-alouds, or verbalizing thinking while reading or working through a new concept, can be a powerful way to help learners explore disciplinary texts, learn new skills, and retain content.
