Question
“The power to question is the basis of all human progress,” Gandhi
Questions are at the epicentre of all learning. Consider the last time you intentionally set out to learn something new to you. Perhaps you wanted to satisfy a curiosity, or maybe you had a problem to solve in your home or workplace? Whatever the case, it is likely that your journey of discovery firstly began with a question. Depending on the type of question you asked or the nature of the problem, you may have found an answer quite quickly using immediately available resources, or maybe the solution needed to be grappled with and was not so obvious. Perhaps one question begot another, triggering a chain of small discoveries that led to a bigger picture of understanding? Was asking questions and finding answers so automatic that you barely noticed that you were doing it? Or did you carefully craft your questions and shape them to meet your need specifically?
One of the identifying features of St Peters is the way that the staff and students work together to foster a culture of inquiry. Our teachers motivate the students to see the world from multiple perspectives and guide them to build their understanding by asking thoughtful, well-constructed questions. Curiosity is valued, questions constructed, and answers and solutions explored. Teachers build an environment of trust where students explore ideas, build theories, and discover passions.
When engaged in inquiry-based learning, the students' questions are equally as important as those of the teacher and are used to drive the learning and assess understanding. Students are encouraged to ask questions about both the curriculum content and their metacognitive process, so they understand the way they learn best. Actively listening and responding to their peers' questions provides further opportunities to collaborate and engage in critical thinking.
Each term, our primary students work on transdisciplinary units of inquiry that centre on a carefully constructed compelling question. Here teams of teachers collaborate to create rich questions that drive the learning over a term or number of weeks. These complex, multifaceted questions are carefully crafted to weave concepts from across learning areas together. Compelling questions do not have obvious or 'Googleable' answers, so they insist that students stretch their mental muscle to test ideas and build theories.
Throughout the unit, teachers guide students to unpack the compelling question by helping them researching smaller, more manageable branching questions. These are the questions that make the compelling question actionable as they provide the scaffold to formulate theories about the bigger idea. Because a question is always an invitation to think, teachers are highly intentional in the way questions used and the ways they elicit student questions to ensure that the curriculum content is taught with integrity and student engagement is maintained. Quality inquiry-based learning should not be considered an unplanned or 'free-range' learning experience.
This term our primary students are exploring the following compelling questions:
Prep: How do we observe change?
Year One: How do different cultures share stories to explain changes in our natural world?
Year 2: How does the way we use and interact with water affect our world?
Year 3: In what ways are celebrations and commemorations expressions of shared faith?
Year 4. How do our personal choices and behaviours affect global environments?
Year 5: What motivates migration?
Year 6: How are our lives different to those of others?
Kate Hofstee
Contemporary Learning Leader
