Insights about Inquiry

Kuhlthau (2007) stated, “The challenge for the 21st-century school is to educate children for living and working in an information-rich technological environment” (p. 2). As my current course, EDUC 6712: Supporting Information Literacy and Online Inquiry in the Classroom, at Walden University draws to a close, I realize now more than ever that in addition to teaching my students to understand our 8th grade English/Language Arts standards, I must also incorporate the instruction of new literacy skills as a critical component in my unit planning. Based on my learning experiences in this course, I have had some striking revelations about teaching new literacy skills and how I can, as a result, modify my current instructional practices so that I might better prepare my students for living and working as productive members of the 21st century society, as Kuhlthau suggested. Furthermore, I have started to contemplate ways in which I can enhance my own professional development so that I can attain more knowledge about literacy and technology, thus making me a more effective educator for my students.

Perhaps the most important revelation I had about teaching new literacy skills as a result of this class was that I simply learned what the most critical objectives were that my students needed to grasp in order to become more technologically fluent by 21st century standards. According to the video “New Literacies” (Laureate Education, Inc., 2009), the five major new literacy skills include questioning, searching, evaluating, synthesizing, and communicating. Before this course, I recognized the importance of helping my students become prepared for their futures as members of a technologically-rich world; however, this task seemed so overwhelming that I scarcely knew where to begin. As we began to develop our own inquiry units, though, I started to realize that it was indeed possible to help my students learn their content standards and, by providing explicit instruction in reference to the five aforementioned new literacy skills, become more prepared for the 21st century workplace. In other words, thanks to this course, I realized not only that it is POSSIBLE to seamlessly integrate new literacy skills into units that focus on content instruction, but I also learned HOW to achieve this goal as I worked on building my inquiry unit centered on the power of persuasion as the course progressed from week to week.

Based upon this revelation of learning how I can teach content and new literacy skills by building engaging, thought-provoking inquiry units, my future teaching practices will certainly be influenced. While I had heard of inquiry units before this class, I had never worked to build one myself; they seemed too intimidating and time-consuming. However, I now realize that those were simply my own ignorant misconceptions. Inquiry units can inspire and motivate my students to engage in deep pursuit of content understandings, all the while enhancing their new literacy skills. What could be more worthy of my instructional time? Therefore, my future teaching practices will reflect these new understandings in the sense that my unit planning will become much more inquiry-based. I will use teacher think-alouds and explicit modeling to scaffold the inquiry process for my students, gradually shifting responsibility to them through guided practice and eventual independent work (Eagleton & Dobler, 2007). Throughout the journey in these units, I will both formally and informally assess my students’ content and new literacy understandings using strategies such as reflective journaling, conferencing, multimedia projects, and rubrics (2007). Overall, based on my experiences in this course, I will look forward to engaging my students in investigative inquiry units that will inspire their passion for learning while also affording them the opportunities to practice critical new literacy skills. I am also more understanding of the fact that students are not as technologically aware as we sometimes believe. Just because our students know how to navigate social networking sites such as Facebook and enjoy activities such as online gaming, it does not mean that they have the skills required to engage in 21st century fluencies such as effectively locating and critically evaluating information. Thus, by incorporating inquiry units in my teaching practices, I can ensure that my students make progress in learning these competencies.

Now that I am completing this course, I have established a goal that I think would benefit me as I strive to enhance my understandings of technology’s use in the classroom, while also truly motivating my students. During Week Six of this course, we had the opportunity to discuss building collaborative partnerships with educators in other classrooms around the country and even the world. I mentioned my desire to build a collaborative wiki with a fellow educator for our students to engage in discussion and learning activities centered on The Giver by Lois Lowry. A fellow student in the course mentioned that she also teaches the same novel and would be interested in initiating a partnership to develop a wiki where our students could engage in an investigative study of the novel together. Therefore, I will take steps to continue this discussion with my colleague to set up such a wiki so that our students can enhance their reading comprehension skills, while also building learning connections with students from other classrooms to broaden their perspectives. As we initially develop this collaboration project, I have confidence that, due to its positive impact on our technology skills, new ideas will spark in time, including utilizing podcasts and blogging to further enhance the learning experience for our students.

I am grateful to have had the opportunity to investigate inquiry learning during the previous eight weeks of this course, for I know that the learning experiences in which I have engaged will have far-reaching consequences for my students in the months they have left in my classroom, while also preparing them for their futures in the 21st century workplace.

References:

Eagleton, M. B., & Dobler, E. (2007). Reading the web: Strategies for internet inquiry. New York: The Guilford Press.

Kuhlthau, C. C., Maniotes, L. K., & Caspari, A. K. (2007). Guided inquiry: Learning in the 21st century. Westport: Libraries Unlimited.

Laureate Education, Inc. (Executive Producer). (2009). New literacies. Supporting information literacy and online inquiry in the classroom. Baltimore: Author.