Chris Wilde's List: Enquiry based Learning

• 1. A Need to Know
• launching a project with an "entry event" that engages interest and initiates questioning.
• With a compelling student project, the reason for learning relevant material becomes clear: I need to know this to meet the challenge I've accepted.
• 2. A Driving Question
• The question should be provocative, open-ended, complex, and linked to the core of what you want students to learn. It could be abstract (When is war justified?); concrete (Is our water safe to drink?); or focused on solving a problem (How can we improve this website so that more young people will use it?).
• A project without a driving question is like an essay without a thesis
• Without a driving question, students may not understand why they are undertaking a project
• 3. Student Voice and Choice
• This element of project-based learning is key. In terms of making a project feel meaningful to students, the more voice and choice, the better. However, teachers should design projects with the extent of student choice that fits their own style and students.
• As a middle ground, teachers might provide a limited menu of options for creative products to prevent students from becoming overwhelmed by choices
• 4. 21st Century Skills
• rubrics they had developed with the teacher's guidance
• opportunities to build such 21st century skills as collaboration, communication, critical thinking, and the use of technology, which will serve them well in the workplace and life
• second criterion for meaningful work—an important purpose
• 5. Inquiry and Innovation
• In real inquiry, students follow a trail that begins with their own questions, leads to a search for resources and the discovery of answers, and often ultimately leads to generating new questions, testing ideas, and drawing their own conclusions. With real inquiry comes innovation—a new answer to a driving question, a new product, or an individually generated solution to a problem. The teacher does not ask students to simply reproduce teacher- or textbook-provided information in a pretty format.
• refer students to the list of questions they generated after the entry event. Coach them to add to this list as they discover new insights. The classroom culture should value questioning, hypothesizing, and openness to new ideas and perspectives.
• 6. Feedback and Revision
• rubrics and exemplars
• creating high-quality products and performances is an important purpose of the endeavor. Students need to learn that most people's first attempts don't result in high quality and that revision is a frequent feature of real-world work.
• teacher should coach students in using rubrics or other sets of criteria to critique one another's work
• 7. A Publicly Presented Product
• The invited audience included parents, peers, and representatives of community, business, and government organizations
• Schoolwork is more meaningful when it's not done only for the teacher or the test. When students present their work to a real audience, they care more about its quality

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