Inquiry happens everywhere

Inquiry-based learning and teaching is one of the foundations of a Primary Years Programme (PYP) education. When learning is relevant and important to students and when they feel engaged and challenged, then we are supporting them to become critical and creative thinkers, researchers, collaborators and communicators. There are three main areas where we work with students to support their inquiries; collaboration, facilitation and timing.

Collaboration
Moving towards:
    • a collaborative, co-constructed experience
    • students as active partners in constructing meaning
    • planning for grouping and regrouping throughout learning experiences
    • teachers continuously collaborating to support the unit of inquiry

Facilitation
Moving towards:
    • conscious decisions regarding guided and open student-initiated inquiry as it fits the purpose of learning
    • inquiry as an ongoing, iterative process of asking, thinking and doing
    • development of skills being considered in authentic contexts within the units of inquiry
    •inquiry as a multi-layered process of investigation and research balancing planned learning experiences with emergent avenues for exploration
    • use of concepts and questions as a means to construct new understandings
    • assessment as an ongoing, varied and integral process to inform teaching and next steps in the inquiry
    • responsible student-initiated action, emerging throughout inquiry

Timing
Moving towards:
    • a rigorous process of continuous learning through inquiry
    • open-ended time frames and flexible processes for inquiry

Just like our students, we are inquirers too. We can act deliberately to move our current understanding to new and deeper levels. As inquirers, you may engage with a wide range of inquiry actions or behaviours. 

You might, for instance:

• explore, wonder and question
• experiment and play with possibilities
• make connections between previous learning and current learning
• make predictions and act purposefully to see what happens
• collect data and report findings
• clarify existing ideas and reappraise perceptions of events
• apply concepts to deepen conceptual understandings
• research and seek information
• establish and test theories
• solve problems in a variety of ways
• take and defend a position

International Baccalaureate. "Inquiry happens everywhere." www.ibo.org, Accessed 10 May 2021.