PD Module 1: Student-led inquiry

Author: The University of Nottinham

Students' curiosity to answer their own questions may be a very powerful drive to engage in high quality inquiry. However, not all student questions are feasible for IBL, and it can be hard for the teacher to provoke productive questions. This professional development module considers how students might be encouraged to ask productive questions for learning.

Potential for PD

In scientific inquiry, researchers will raise their own questions, search for ways to answer them, and evaluate their results. In the classroom, students experience much less ownership, as the teacher will be likely to pose the questions, provide the methods and evaluate the results.
In this module, teachers will be encouraged to experience what it feels like to think like a mathematician or scientist, and reflect on the role shifts that are necessary for students to share this experience in the classroom.

Characteristics

The basic structure of the module is that, first, teachers are shown phenomena and situations and are invited to pose and pursue their own questions. Next, they observe successful IBL classroom practices on video. These experiences are then transferred to the classroom, and finally, they report back on the outcomes.

Concrete examples being addressed in this module include:

  • Predicting the trajectory of a paper cup rolling over the floor
  • Inducing rules that govern the walking behavior of the ‘turtle’ in the “spirolaterals” computer animation
  • Recognizing and extending structures in pavements and other geometric patterns (examples include building a house from waste plastic bottles)

Doing the module with teachers will take a first session of about 2 hours, a week in between for the teachers to try out in their own classroom, and another half hour or so in a second session. This module is the first in a series of 7, and the second session could also be the start of the second module "Tackling Unstructured Problems”.

Inquiry processes

The inquiry processes in this module are structured according to a modeling cycle. The major inquiry processes addressed in this module are:

  • Simplifying and representing the situation
  • Analyzing and solving the model they’ve made
  • Interpreting and evaluating the results
  • Communicating and reflecting on the findings

Materials

Classroom video: Building with plastic waste

Supplementary materials

Install the software applets

These pages require a web browser with Javascript and Adobe Flash Player 9 or newer to use the video and software.
The software applets can be browsed as part of each module. If you want to install them separately on students' machines you can download the set (and more) as a Windows installer or as Mac applications. Alternatively, they are availavble in browser-based format for any system that supports Flash.

Credits


This module has been compiled for PRIMAS from professional development materials developed by the Shell Centre team at the Centre for Research in Mathematics Education, University of Nottingham. Many of these materials were originally written for the Bowland Maths project, funded by the Bowland Charitable Trust, or for the Improving Learning in Mathematics project which was funded by the Department for Education and Skills Standards Unit.

 
Last change: 15 mei 2012
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