My First Inquiry Lesson!

Teaching my first inquiry lesson was actually more overwhelming for me as compared to the direct lesson. We were still down a group member, and we had to edit the lesson and get the supplies in the span of a day. But we made it work, just like we did for the direct lesson.

Although I had never taught it before, the direct style was most similar to what I have done in my other fieldwork experiences. Inquiry was completely new to me, which was very scary. I found it very hard to prepare for inquiry because I had no idea how the student would react to what we were giving them. I struggled to decide if we were throwing too much or too little at them, and discovered that the only way to find out was to wait and see.

The problem that we posed to our students was that they needed to help Engineer Jane by building simple machines to help her finish building a rollercoaster. To create Engineer Jane we used a voki. I had never used a voki and thought it was a really engaging tool. I definitely will consider using a voki in future lessons. After posing the problem, we gave students pieces of simple machines and had them resemble them. They then had to explain what they did and draw a picture of how they would use their simple machine to build the rollercoaster.

After teaching the lesson, I feel that there were many things that we could improve on. We could have explained the inquiry sheet in more detail, or even cut the sheet down so it was not so overwhelming. When we had four group members we originally planned for each of us to stay with one group the whole time. With three members it was a little more challenging, and we did our best to jump from group to group. I feel that we should have helped each group get started so we could keep them on task. 

Despite the challenges, I feel that my group did well with what we were given. There is always room for improvement, but I am proud of how my group taught.