The MYP Top Ten #3

The Global Eagle - Week October 31 - November 4, 2016

1- The Learner Profile
2- Concept based learning

3- Inquiry Questions

As we continue deepening our understanding of the Middle Years Programme, this week I invite you to read the attached section about Inquiry Learning from Principles into Practice guide. As we want our classes to be scaffolding inquiry we have to ask all 3 types of questions: factual, conceptual, and debatable as we unfold our units Inquiry Statement.

Statement of inquiry
Teachers construct the statement of inquiry for a unit by combining a key concept, one or more related concepts, and a global context for the unit into a meaningful statement that students can understand.
This statement expresses the relationship between concepts and context; it represents a transferable idea supported by factual content. Statements of inquiry facilitate synergistic thinking, synthesizing factual and conceptual levels of mental processing and creating a greater impact on cognitive development than either level of thinking by itself (Erickson 2007; Marzano 2009).
The statement of inquiry:
• represents a contextualized, conceptual understanding
• describes a complex relationship that is worthy of inquiry
• explains clearly what students should understand and why that understanding is meaningful
• can be qualified (using phrases such as “often”, “may” and “can”) if it is not true in all situations, but is still an important idea
• can be formulated at different levels of specificity.
Teachers can make very broad statements more specific, age-appropriate and focused by asking themselves “Why/how does this relationship or principle occur?” and “What are the implications of this understanding?”
However, statements of inquiry should not be so specific that they cannot be transferable beyond the content of the unit.
Inquiry questions
Inquiry questions are drawn from, and inspired by, the statement of inquiry. Teachers and students develop these questions to explore the statement of inquiry in greater detail. Students can develop their own questions in ways that satisfy curiosity and deepen understanding. The strands of subject-specific objectives can also be helpful in formulating inquiry questions.
Inquiry questions give shape and scope to a unit of study, and they help to scaffold the objectives that students should strive to achieve. As the unit progresses, both teachers and students can develop additional questions to explore.

(FPTP guide p.62)

PJ

MYP Coordinator