Inquiry-based Learning: Education in an Era of Hyper-speed

THERE HAS NEVER BEEN A GREATER NEED FOR EDUCATION REFORM THAN THE PRESENT MOMENT.

Educators and parents face an enormous challenge today in preparing present and upcoming generations for a rapidly changing and highly unpredictable future. In the next few decades automation and artificial intelligence may make seemingly stable professions largely redundant. Changes to our climate may possibly lead to sweeping migration and drastic transformation of economic production models. Technologies that seem cutting edge and rich in opportunity may be entirely obsolete by the time today’s kindergartner enters the job market. As a result, an educational model that was developed for the industrial era is likely to be entirely insufficient to the actual world our children and students will live in.

So how can we best prepare these children for the world they will inherit, whose parameters we can only guess at? The philosophy of education known as inquiry-based learning or phenomenon-based learning has been developed and applied with great success in countries such as Finland and Singapore that regularly score towards the top of global educational benchmarks such as the PISA test. My approach to curriculum design and pedagogy is informed by these same principles and my goal is to cultivate young minds of tomorrow’s global influencers who are fully prepared for the shifting ideals and needs of a new era.

Consider the following scenario:

It is the year 2045. Mike and Mika are best friends having earned identical degrees at university, accepted equivalent jobs at the same accounting firm upon graduation, and followed parallel paths of career advancement. Now, both in their mid-30’s and starting families, Mike and Mika are unexpectedly laid off — the advancement of AI has rendered their highly specialized skill sets obsolete.

Mike is shattered and unable to conceive of a viable alternative to a career he invested a decade preparing for. He spends the next year checking want ads for related positions to no avail. Meanwhile, Mika spends the following week producing and analyzing a matrix of viable solutions before identifying an expanding market that involves deploying her formidable analytic skills to conceive of and advocate for large scale urban transformation projects for displaced populations. She sets out independently acquiring a new set of skills, and bravely pursuing a fresh endeavor. What enabled Mika to succeed in a scenario that devastated her best friend and colleague? Mike received traditional subject-based instruction up to 12th grade, which equated success with the mastery of bodies of facts and accurate processing according to prescribed norms. Mika, who just happened to attend school in Finland, was taught according to a method that grounded learning in fundamental questions, was highly contextual, and developed both analytic and creative sides to problem solving.  

Unfortunately, educators in U.S. schools often fail to teach our children how exciting and mesmerizingly beautiful the inquiry process can be — fixating on the destination rather than the journey of learning. If our nation’s citizens are to acquire the skills necessary to remain competitive in an age of accelerating change, it is paramount that we urgently engage in a humanist approach to STEM Education reform to revolutionize our standings in the global knowledge economy.

Creative thinking is not an inborn talent, but a skill that can be learned.   

Our children and students will inherit an era of effortless access to a burgeoning database of collective knowledge, where value comes less from memorization of facts and more from the ability to apply them to find unexpected insights and applications. Many of the repetitive, processing-oriented occupations will wither away, even as the need to effectively communicate and mobilize resources to address global issues will be ever more important. For these reasons, today’s children with poor creative problem-solving skills will become tomorrow’s adults struggling to find or keep a good job. However, the notion that the ability to think creatively is an inherent talent is a fallacy; it is a muscle that must be exercised, a passion that must be nurtured and encouraged from a very young age.

So how does one teach creativity? 

According to the research of psychologist and philosopher, Edward de Bono, creativity can be developed through challenges in lateral thinking— the solving of problems by an indirect and creative approach, typically through viewing the problem in a new and unusual light. One of the most effective ways to do this is through integrated, interdisciplinary investigation of a problem, theme, or phenomenon, where learners become open to making unexpected connections. For example, a teacher may choose to extend an exploration of sustainable systems by challenging students to improve the overall energy efficiency of their own homes. A third grader may tie together their understanding of energy loss, simple machines, and magnets to conceive of a device that will keep the door to the family refrigerator shut once and for all. Given the time to test, analyze, and redesign their invention, this child will not only have reduced their carbon footprint, but mom and dad’s energy bill as well.

To understand lateral thinking more thoroughly, try this exercise with your family: Set a timer for two minutes. From the moment the timer starts to the moment it ends, write down every possible use for a spoon that you can imagine. Who won? Why do you think that happened?

CULTIVATING CREATIVE THINKERS

By engaging with the educational systems that have been most successful in developing passionate learners who are able to not only master complex material, but also solve problems in creative ways, some common themes emerge. In my practice, I seek to draw on those lessons to create an approach to learning that will prepare the scholars, citizens, and artists of tomorrow.

• Inquiry-based Instruction - Rather than simply presenting established facts, inquiry-based learning is a form of active, student-centered instruction that starts each lesson with a skillfully posed question or problem aimed to engage and challenge learners. When executed successfully, strategic facilitation by the teacher empowers students to explore, imagine, reinvent solutions and ultimately, construct their own approaches to understanding reality.

• Thematic Learning - Children process ideas more deeply when a cross-disciplinary approach is used to explore an idea across multiple ways to understand and explore a subject or theme. For young children, the theme of the seasons could come alive through studying the life cycle of plants and insects, reciting poems and playing music related to the seasons, and learning to measure and graph changes in temperature and precipitation. As learners advance to more complex methods of inquiry and analysis, they are encouraged to seek unexpected connections across science, the humanities, and the arts around major themes including social justice, the impact of technology, or urban migration.

• Contextual - To be engaging, learning must be grounded in questions, observations, and experiences that are tangible and excite the learners’ imaginations. This type provides urgency as different approaches, analytical tools, and algorithms are brought to bear to investigate the matter that students are now emotionally invested in. The operative word here is “flexibility.”

• Collaborative - The ability to work in teams makes learning into a shared social value and greatly contributes to the retention of information and enthusiasm for the pursuit of knowledge as a project to which multiple people contribute to solutions.

• Authentic - Leading young minds through a process of asking questions, testing approaches, channeling collaboration, and making materials relevant requires a whole different level of commitment and preparation from teachers. They too must be engaged collaborators! Elaborate planning and the ability to improvise must work together, while the teacher’s passion for the subject matter must be infectious.

Aligned with the philosophy of influential agents for education reform like John Dewey, Jean Piaget, and Maria Montessori, the notion that learners should be treated as active participants in their own discovery process is nothing new. Applied collectively, inquiry-based and phenomenon-based learning practices will revolutionize the way we approach school and, as a result, the students that graduate from them.  

What does it look like when we teach kids, not subjects?

To understand phenomenon-based learning, first imagine your child sitting in their elementary school science class in a traditional school. The first two units in their textbook covered The Scientific Method and The Properties of Matter and they are now beginning a unit on Life Cycles. They read all about life cycles in their textbook, complete several related assignments, and take a weekly quiz. After a few weeks, they answer a number of fact-based questions on a final exam and, regardless or whether they passed or failed, move to the next unit in the textbook. The topic of life cycles will not be revisited for the remainder of the year.  

Now, imagine your child attends a school implementing a phenomenon-based curriculum. A first grader is motivated by natural curiosity and asks: “Why are some ladybugs yellow?” Supported by enthusiastic interest from the rest of the class, the teacher orders several dozen ladybug eggs that the children raise in the classroom over the course of the next month. Your child and their classmates record observations of the ladybugs in interactive notebooks each day—watching as they hatch into larvae, crystallize into a pupae, and emerge as adult ladybugs. Together, the class develops a list of critical questions that they would like answered. They form a variety of hypotheses that they test while they acquire and practice skills in measurement, mathematics, biology, and drawing that they need to record and analyze their data.  Collaborative planning amongst your child’s teachers results in supplemental activities involving reading, writing, engineering, multimedia design, visual and performance art, civil debate, public outreach, and much more. Driven again, by the authentic interest of the class, the teacher facilitates a series of daily, mini-experiments. Does a ladybug prefer a wet or a dry habitat? What is the ideal temperature for a ladybug habitat? What is a ladybug’s favorite food?

“But why are some ladybugs yellow,” one student asks again? As the insects begin to hatch, students see some yellow ladybugs, but then they switch to red. The students grapple with their observations in search of an explanation until finally, someone has the idea to put a hidden camera in the ladybug habitat. The following day, the teacher reveals a video to show the class a ladybug hatching from its pupae  caught on camera!  Eagerly leaning forward, the class watches together and….the new ladybug is yellow!  Your child raises her hand to suggest skipping forward in the video and sure enough, the ladybug has turned red after several hours. Yellow ladybugs are just red ladybugs that have freshly hatched!

Through facilitated, student-governed inquiry, kids don’t just learn- they learn how to learn.   

A direct comparison of these instructional styles clearly illuminates phenomenon-based learning as the superior methodology for stimulating authentic engagement, collaboration, critical thinking, and autonomy amongst its participants. In the former scenario, your child and their classmates received isolated content about life cycles through reading, writing, and listening rituals. All of the required information was distributed with the expectation that memorization would lead to understanding. This practice, coined “The Banking Model of Education” by Brazilian educator and philosopher, Paulo Freire, treats knowledge as a stagnant entity to be “deposited,” with teachers as the sole source of all valuable information and students as “containers” to be filled.

While such a praxis has equipped prior generations with the skills necessary to serve specialized societal roles, such a fragmented approach to curriculum design creates minds with handicapped creative potential.

It is a different era, and we need fresh approaches to pedagogy and education. It is worth noting that in a 2013 study of Google Employees, the seven most important qualities were: being a good coach; communicating and listening well; possessing insights into others; having empathy toward and being support of one’s colleagues; being a good critical thinker and problem solver, and being able to make connections across complex ideas. These qualities are valuable in many fields beyond technology.

A holistic approach to education creates minds able to rapidly acquire new modes of learning, develop new strategies, adapt to the needs of future quandaries and fully explore their own passions. In this model, the individual interest and talents that make each child unique are not ignored but rather, fully embraced in order to create a dynamic community of diverse learners. Autonomy, creativity, and lateral thinking are valued over rote memorization, creating students fluent in their ability to generate original ideas. Motivated not by grades, but by the natural curiosity that is present in every child, a humanist approach to education creates intrinsically-motivated kids that simply love to learn.

A generation of creatively literate citizens is a non-negotiable requirement for future success.

Through the implementations of child-centered curriculum, students are taught how to teach themselves, how to define and solve their own problems, how to work collaboratively towards meaningful goals; all skills that will empower them to become the innovators, leaders, and change agents of tomorrow.