"I can't believe a kid did that": Powerful examples of student inquiry work

As outlined in my last post here, inquiry involves what David Perkins calls "playing the whole game" where students are given the opportunity to partake in developmentally appropriate versions of the ways professionals in a field engage, create knowledge, and communicate in their discipline. Educators advocating for this approach argue that each discipline (e.g., science, mathematics, history) has its own particular ways of generating knowledge, verifying what counts as quality work, and communicating to a public audience.  The job of educators thus becomes to apprentice young people into these practices. 

Helping teachers plan for this philosophy of education, the Galileo Educational Network has created a discipline-based inquiry rubric involving a number of core characteristics that should guide planning. We know a project is following this model when:

1. Authentic: The inquiry study is authentic in that it emanates from a question, problem, issue, or exploration that is significant to the disciplines and addresses a problem or issue that exists in society at this time providing students with an opportunity to connects to the world beyond the school.

2. Project based approach/ builds new knowledge/products: Students are given opportunities to create products or culminating work that contributes to the building of new knowledge.

3. Fosters deep understanding: Sub tasks and activities provoke thinking, deeper knowledge, and understanding and more sophisticated discipline-based skill development. Specifically, tasks generally include generating with students criteria for what makes a powerful work in a particular medium or discipline and evaluating good and bad examples of, where possible, real work by professionals in the field. 

4. Ongoing formative assessment loops are woven into the design of the inquiry study and involve detailed descriptive feedback.

5. Connect with experts and expertise: The study requires students to observe and interact with exemplars and expertise drawn from the discipline or medium under study, including, if possible, professionals in the field. 

6. Technology integration/elaborated communication: Students are given the opportunity to communicate their ideas and insights in powerful ways through particular mediums.

7. Public showcases: Students’ present final products to the greater community through public presentations, exhibitions, or showcases.

·         Here are a series of examples of student work facilitated by myself and colleagues at Calgary Science   School that reflect the axiom of Larry Rosenstock, principal of High Tech High, that you know when you are doing inquiry when someone from the outside says "I can't believe a kid did that." Indeed Larry; indeed. 

        For each example I have attached a link where you can find a description of the project, and in most cases, video footage of students in the classroom. 

  

1. As shown in this blog post, in this inquiry unit grade 8 students had the opportunity to become writers, designers, and publishers of their own magazine. Here are some examples of the incredible work they created, which was then published on the You Publish site Issue :

In this inquiry project, outlined in this blog post, I wanted my students to communicate their opinion on an a recent court case in which one of the principles of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms was involved. They did this through a Rick Mercer Rant; examples of which can be found on the blog post.


MercerStyle Rant from Calgary Science School on Vimeo.


In this inquiry project, outlined in this blog post, using Comic Life and Pixton, students were asked to re-create a short story into graphic novel form. Here are some examples of the amazing work students produced: