Free Inquiry Update: Some Inquiry Teachers and Materials

This week I took a break from reading the Inquiry Mindset book. Instead, I researched different teacher’s Instagram accounts that follow the inquiry-based model of teaching. The first thing I noticed was that there are many more elementary teacher accounts than high school. I think this is because once students get to high school, most of the exploration is more individual and on the computers.

Here is a list of accounts that stood out to me:

• https://www.instagram.com/playful.inquiry.teacher/
• https://www.instagram.com/joysofkinder/
• https://www.instagram.com/inquiryteacher/

The three teachers above teach in either kindergarten or grade one classrooms. One commonality between the accounts is that they all seem to use mostly wooden materials like this: https://www.instagram.com/islandpegdolls/?hl=en Additionally, I saw that most classroom’s materials were very organic. I decided to do some more research into why that is…

Here is an explanation of the characteristics your materials in an inquiry-based classroom should have:

Relationship between materials and environment in children’s learning

“According to Vygotsky ([1930–1935] 1978), the types of materials teachers choose for children to use mediate children’s development of higher mental processes. In addition, how and where materials are placed in the environment influences how children can use those materials (Kozulin et al. 2003). Furthermore, experiences with materials shape the development of shared meaning between individuals, giving shared meaning to symbolic cognitive tools such as letters, numbers, or words.”

“Open-ended materials offer meaningful ways for children to deepen their understanding of a concept, build creativity, and heighten their cognitive abilities (Daly & Beloglovsky 2015). When children use different materials (clay, wire, etc.) to explore the same concept, they learn more about the concept because of the affordances that each medium possesses. Foreman (1994) defines affordances as “the relationship between the transformable properties of a medium and the child’s desire to use that property to make symbols” (4). Some mediums are better than others when representing a concept, because of both the child’s ability to manipulate the medium and the medium’s potential to symbolize the concept.”

I highly recommend that you follow the instagram accounts that I linked above. They are all so inspiring and give so much insight into what and inquiry classroom looks like.