Inquiry Based Teaching Method

Introduction

Topic is always been hot and never ending for discussion amongst the trainer/ tutors/ teachers/ professors is how to get students/trainees involved, how to enable them, and motivate them to learn more and to learn it better. Very often we leave the classroom feeling as if our students did not get the main points, did not understand the concepts, or perhaps, that they had not even read the required material. Many often does it seem that they just do not care. In this scenario How often do we take action to remedy to change this state of affairs? Do we resort to the same old lecture format? Do we ask the same tired essay questions? Most teaching styles follow the traditional lecture format-we talk-they listen. They probably take

A teaching method known as 'Inquiry based teaching' has been adapted where followers claim the method builds analytic skills, improves students’ knowledge base, and promotes student engagement. Inquiry students are more likely to build hypotheses, integrate, and apply new knowledge more than students in traditional lecture-format classrooms. This method break from the traditional lecture format and ask the student to take an active role in his or her own learning. Inquiry based learning begins when students are presented with a problem and some suggestions and tools for finding the answer to that problem. They struggle, with help from the instructor, through the problem until they reach their answer, having constructed it themselves. Beyer (1979) in his book on the inquiry method

The teacher scaffolds learning for students , gradually removing the scaffolding as student develop their skills. The teacher facilitates the discussion by providing a few foundational facts, or tells the students where to find them. In more advanced forms of inquiry, the teacher would be relatively silent, letting the students’ natural curiosity and previous class work guide the students’ efforts. Students are asked to come up with a hypothesis that would, if tested, provide answers to the question or problem posed and then to think of ways to test that hypothesis (Adamson,et.al., 2000; Ensrud, 1997). Building a hypothesis, testing, synthesizing, evaluating, and applying new information are part and parcel of inquiry-learning and they form Bloom’s taxonomy of higher-order skills. As facilitator, the teacher would help them plan and carry out their investigation. Teachers can witness and note how students learn and can deal with any problems as they arise (Bender, 2005; French, 2005; Wyatt, 2005; Gearhart & Saxe, 2004). Or, a teacher may define the question, the processes of answering that question, and the means by which to interpret the findings, in more structured approaches (Colburn, 2004). Students learn from each other as well as from the teacher as students devise ways to test the hypothesis and carry out the actual experiments