Inquiry-Based Learning That Sparks Agency In Civics

We push past rote coverage to show how inquiry turns students into investigators who ask better questions, weigh evidence, and communicate claims. We link inquiry to the EAD roadmap, Arizona standards, and practical frameworks teachers can use right away.

• defining inquiry as student-driven questioning and evidence use
• what inquiry looks like versus what it is not
• teacher as facilitator and curator of sources
• unsettled questions that anchor investigations
• collaboration, civil discourse and productive struggle
• aligning inquiry with the EAD roadmap and state standards
• teaching students to ask better questions with Costa’s levels
• practical frameworks including the 5E model
• resources for elementary through high school
• transfer to media literacy, civic action and careers
• start small, commit, and build capacity over time

We will put all of the resources in the show notes for everyone

Check Out the Civic Literacy Curriculum!

School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership

Center for American Civics

Chapters

• 1:32 Setting The Stage: Inquiry Focus
• 2:53 Defining Inquiry And Why It Matters
• 6:13 Students As Questioners, Not Vessels
• 6:53 What Inquiry Looks Like In Class
• 9:51 What Inquiry Is Not
• 12:52 Teacher As Curator And Guide
• 14:29 Connecting Inquiry To The EAD Roadmap
• 17:51 Questions Over Content Lists
• 19:09 Where Teachers Start: Teach Questions
• 21:31 Elementary-Friendly Inquiry Resources
• 24:53 Frameworks: Five Es And More
• 26:51 Journalism And Global Competency Tools
• 28:21 Why Inquiry Skills Travel Beyond Class
• 30:54 Media Literacy And Civic Life
• 33:04 Start Small And Commit Over Time
• 34:38 The Payoff: Student-Driven Joy

Transcript

SPEAKER_03: 0:46

Welcome back to Civics in the Year. Today, our episode from the Arizona Civics podcast is talking about inquiry-based learning. And this is one we did all the way back in 2022. We were lucky enough to have a grant where we had 30 teachers from around the state of Arizona learning about the educating for American democracy roadmap. We were going through lots of different things. And one of the things is inquiry-based learning. So in this episode, we kind of take our classes and our students from passive learning to active learning to show them what inquiry can do for their understanding of history. We talk about what inquiry is, what it is not, and what resources are available for students. And this episode features Jeremy Gipton, Tammy Waller, and Tara Bartlett.

SPEAKER_04: 1:40

Enjoy. Today's episode, we are discussing inquiry-based methods, what they are, and why they are a way to elevate what's happening in the classroom. So with me, as always, are my three amazing task force chairs Tammy, Jeremy, and Tara. We're just going to have a discussion about this today. So my very first question here is just really to get to the point: what is inquiry?

SPEAKER_02: 2:07

Yeah, I'll go ahead and start. Tara here. Hi, everyone. And I'm actually going to open up with a quote to kind of demonstrate inquiry itself. So tell me and I forget. Teach me and I may remember and involve me and I learn by Benjamin Franklin. And I think inquiry itself can really speak to that in terms of it's the essence of education. You can reach as far back as John Dewey, champion for public education and democracy, and that inextricable link to inquiry and the experiential learning. So wanting students to have experiences and applying their learning, experimenting with that learning. I mean, it's actually very much unlike the banking model of education that views students just as empty vessels, waiting to be filled, completely devoid of their own, you know, culture, experiences, worldviews. Whereas inquiry takes all of those into consideration and allows those students to apply their culture, their worldviews and experiences to their own learning.

SPEAKER_00: 3:24

So I love what you said, Tara. This is Tammy about this empty vessel. Because I think about the fact that nowadays, with everyone having a microprocessor in their phone and the ability to get tons of information from the internet and Google, they can fill their own vessel. But what they do with that vessel is really important and how they use that information. So when I think of inquiry, I think of it as a process that students of all ages, right, go through. And with inquiry, you have students taking ownership of their learning by doing the work of the content area field. So think about it as if we're studying history, then they're thinking like historian and doing the work of a historian. So when I think about inquiry, and it can be anything from a warm-up in a classroom to an entire unit, you have students who are focused on some sort of stimulus, like a question, a big question that has not been settled yet. And students are exploring that question kind of like history detectives. So sometimes the teacher gives the question, sometimes students will develop questions themselves. They're using primary and secondary sources and evidence to create an evidence-based answer, defend that answer, and then communicate that answer to others. So they're going through an entire process of thinking, learning, and communicating.

SPEAKER_01: 4:56

Yeah, I I agree with what you folks both just said. And I'll just add to it, for me, an emphasis has got to be on learning through asking, asking for information, asking for information through questions. And I think if you stop there though, you could you could say that, well, well, anytime I give my kids a test, anytime a teacher asks the students questions, well, isn't that that there are questions. Questions are being asked, information is being had through questioning. I think the that that comes up short. I think the vital, a vital dimension to this is that the students are asking the questions. And I think for me, the implication goes beyond students asking questions, it's also students developing questions because there's a whole layer of thinking and content knowledge that develops alongside and because of asking questions. And then as you learn, you're able to ask better, deeper, more effective, and interesting questions. And so it's yeah, it's all about the questions. And I think that it's all about students developing and asking questions.

SPEAKER_04: 6:07

What does inquiry specifically look like in a classroom setting? So whether, I mean, we can talk about kindergarten, we can talk about middle school, high school. What does that look like in a classroom? But I also want to ask the question, what does it not look like? Because I think a lot of times we get stuck in like, here's what you should do, here's what you should do. But also I want to make sure we talk about here's what it is, not.

SPEAKER_00: 6:29

Sure. So inquiry in the classroom is it can be done in many different ways and very unique to different classroom experiences, but it has some elements in common. So in an inquiry classroom, you have a lot of questions, like Jeremy had stated. In the beginning, a question could be generated by a teacher, or students can generate their own questions, but you see students really digging into those questions. So it's very collaborative. Inquiry is very collaborative. So it doesn't look like the teacher up on the board lecturing about something. It starts with that big question. And those questions really should be open-ended and not settled. Um, one of my favorite questions I used to use when teaching history was Was the American Revolution really revolutionary? Because it gave students something to really be able to come up with lots of different answers to it. There wasn't one settled question. It should look like students working with authentic sources. So a multiplicity of primary and secondary sources. When I taught it to younger students, I would bring the sources in in a box with a magnifying glass, and they could be like detectives. And we did like a little role play with it, and I called them my history detectives. Students who are older might might have some sort of simulation or task that their inquiries is centered around. But you have a lot of collaboration, you have questions and authentic resources. And an inquiry classroom tends to be, to me, at least a little bit noisy, and there's just that buzz of discussion and and energy happening. It doesn't look like students sitting compliantly just listening. So students have are the learners, maybe teachers are more the uh facilitators or guides.

SPEAKER_01: 8:14

Yeah, I think it's important that if if someone were to walk into a classroom where, and again, it's a it it looks like a lot of things, but if someone were to walk into a classroom where inquiry is being done, for lack of a better word, where the students are reasonably proficient at it, at coming up with their own and exploring their own and answering their own and then comparing answers to questions, uh yeah, it's gonna be it is it's definitely gonna be a a louder, more uh I don't know what word I'm looking for, but yeah, it's not going to be, it's not gonna be a bunch of people sitting in columns and rows staring. I think one thing that I'll I'll throw out, not I think, one thing I'll throw out about what it doesn't look like is again, and I know I'm gonna sound like I'm harping on this, this is not teachers feeding students questions. That's that's not that's not the way that's not the way it works. So if if you're thinking about like, hey, how can I write an inquiry lesson? One thing I would I would do after you go through and write it is ask yourself at each step, am I continually, am I continually pouring like water into the bucket? Am I continually supplying the questions? Or are the students either starting off, depending on how proficient they are with it, are they starting off asking questions, or throughout the lesson or throughout a unit, for example, are they progressively taking on more responsibility and ownership by asking more of the questions themselves? And that these questions are relevant and drive this investigation. And if you look at it and you're like, you know what, we kind of flatlined, it's just me, me, me, me, me, or we reached like a balance point, then you might want to ask yourself, uh, maybe this isn't exactly inquiry, maybe this is pointing toward inquiry, but it's actually not it, because the the teacher is still bearing the burden of providing the motive force to make the lesson and the learning move forward. I think real inquiry, when the kids know how to do it, depending on the model you want to adopt, and then they become proficient at it, they start to, whether they realize it or not, they're providing the motive force behind the lesson instead of the teacher constantly saying, Okay, here, answer these five questions. You have four minutes. No. So I think I would I would ask myself that. And if it does look like that, then it's probably not inquiry.

SPEAKER_02: 10:36

Just listening to both Tammy and Jeremy here as a teacher, a lot of times there might be this hesitancy to use inquiry in the classroom due to this sense of almost giving up that control, right? To the students in class. But instead, inquiry should be uh viewed more so as a journey with your students through the content, where you're co-creating and co-discovering and co-questioning that content together. So it's really a pedagogical method, an approach as to how to deliver the content itself. And again, it's just one tool in your teacher toolbox, right? There's always time and place for direct instruction and other teaching strategy tools. It's not something you're probably going to necessarily use in every lesson every day, but it's getting past what you know, Jeremy and Tammy alluded to is getting past this rote fact memorization or the teacher being the holder of all knowledge and bestowing that upon students, but rather, as was stated, is an investigation or an exploration. And it's really again through asking those questions. So the teacher's role in inquiry is really this facilitator, right? They're going to be the discussant, and as Tammy pointed out, the curator of materials, which is actually a really important, Tammy. I'm glad you had brought that up, a really important aspect of inquiry. Because as the teacher, the materials that you bring in for your students to do inquiry with, you're already setting up guardrails, or you're at least creating some type of bounded case around these documents or sources that you want your students to use. So that's really key. And I think that also is, you know, something that can make or break an inquiry-based lesson as being that successful curation of materials. And students in inquiry, they really do need to be given, you know, as Jeremy talked about, that kind of time, that space, the intellectual struggle, the asking of those questions around those materials that have been curated, but then also a time for co-learning with their peers to be able to discuss what it was that they're observing, to ask, even amongst their peers, questions around the sources or the topic at hand, which really also, you know, drives home that healthy debate and deliberation and civil discourse that we want our students to be engaged in already. But it's it's really important also for students to have that time to, you know, have that collective struggle with their peers to hear how others are understanding the content, which I think again goes back to that idea that students are not empty vessels. And sometimes, you know, students have their own lens and their own lived experiences that they might bring into that space around those materials. And just learning from one another is really important as well to the inquiry method.

SPEAKER_04: 13:22

I love that you said inquiry is a journey through the content with your students. So as teachers, we are facilitators and curators of resources. And if you haven't listened to the primary source episode of this podcast, I very highly suggest it because again, as you listen, all of these things weave in together. So I do want to ask my next question is how does, I mean, we've talked about what inquiry is, what it's not, how it can be used in the classroom, but how exactly does this tie in with the EAD?

SPEAKER_02: 13:54

Inquiry is just baked into the framework already of the EAD model, right? And it's about making that content relevant to students, really posing and positioning students to be able to grapple with, and then, you know, as we've talked about, ask their own questions of that content. Of course, all done through those primary sources and being able to formulate evidence-based claims. And so I think a lot of what we've already really talked about, it's an easy lift that is already taking place within the EAD framework. And inquiry questions can be used again for all sorts of activities. I know Tammy had spoken to some, but even throughout the EAD framework, you know, posing some of these questions that are available amongst the seven themes as part of an inquiry platform to just even, you know, start your lesson, some type of opening question to gauge students', you know, interest. You could actually use a lot of those questions in the EAD framework of the seven themes to do a deeper dive into specific content areas and diverse materials that you're curating. It also could those questions could be used as you know, deliberation and discussion around Socratic seminars. And again, a lot of those questions in the EAD framework around the seven themes can be used for reflection for students to reflect upon, you know, post-lesson or after looking through certain materials. So it's already there. I think it's again just a really easy lift as a teacher to pinpoint which questions to take from the EAD themes and framework and implement those alongside lessons in your classroom.

SPEAKER_01: 15:32

Yeah, and I'll just add to that that so much of EAD implies an active an active student, students actively learning the material. They're not just, again, there is empty vessels having having information, not even knowledge, just information imparted upon them. They're active participants in this, and there's a reason for that. And we'll address this in the last question. I think there's room to talk about it more there. But but inquiry, obviously, if if done right, is it such a it's such an active mode of learning, and it it develops it helps develop so many good habits and dispositions interpersonally, intellectually in people, that it it just marries so well with so many of the other things that are explicitly and implicitly a part of EAD?

SPEAKER_00: 16:28

So I'm just going to add a few things on because just such great information on this question so far. The one thing I want to add on is there was a big debate when the roadmap was being created, and part of the participants wanted a list of content that students should know. But the other half said, well, why not a list of questions instead? Because the questions will need a foundational aspect of content, but questions offer so many more opportunities for students to bring their own perspective, to get involved, to get student agency. So in the end, the entire roadmap was created based on this idea of inquiry or questions. So students across the United States would grapple with the same types of questions, but students in South Dakota might approach it a little bit different than students in Massachusetts or Arizona. And I think that's one of the geniuses of the EAD roadmap. The fourth pedagogical principle is inquiry, and that teachers should be using the inquiry process as part of teaching the roadmap. So it is EAD. It's almost synonymous with inquiry. And it also connects, and I'm just going to do a little state standards connection. Our Arizona state standards are inquiry-based as well. And if you look especially at those SP or skills and process standards, those take students through the entire inquiry process for all of the different content areas in the social studies. So I think it's um, I think it's connected to EAD, it's connected to our state standards, and it's connected to student desire to have a voice and a say and to matter because if you're asking inquiry questions, then you are trusting the students and you're also celebrating these incredible answers that students develop in response to questions.

SPEAKER_04: 18:27

If I'm a teacher and I'm listening to this podcast right now and I'm like, this is all really, really great, but where do I go? How do I learn more about inquiry? Where should we point teachers? And again, all the resources that are going to be talked about will absolutely be in the show notes. So, what resources are available for teachers who have more questions about inquiry-based learning?

SPEAKER_01: 18:50

Well, I think the first thing that teachers need to do if you want to do inquiry and you want to do it well and you want to do it effectively, I think you've got to teach your kids to ask questions. You have to teach your students how to ask good, clear, useful questions that can help them drive an investigation, whether that's going to be over like a lesson or two or a longer block of instruction, you know, in terms of focus on a given block of content. You've got to teach them how to write and ask and consider and then reframe good questions because they don't know how. Maybe that sounds horrible, but really they don't know how to ask good questions. Most people don't know how to ask good questions and not just like maybe they'll ask several questions to start something, but how do you ask, how do you then look at your questions and the answers you might have gotten and then maybe reframe those same questions to peel back more layers, or ask a second round, a follow-up round of questions to drive your investigation and clarify it and focus it. People just don't know how to do that. Uh two weeks from now, a new another episode is going to drop about actionable models of inquiry. And one of the ones that I talked about at length is uh Costa's levels of questions. So if you go look up Costa, C-O-S T A, plus levels of questions in a in a search, you'll find some information about a model that I think is particularly effective in teaching students how to ask different kinds of questions. And it also establishes a common vocabulary, conceptual and intellectual, that enables you to work with them to help them write even better questions. Because if the kids aren't asking questions, at some point they're just not doing inquiry. So teach them to ask questions, wait for the episode on 11 on April 11th, or go looking for Costa's levels of questions. That's what I would say first and foremost.

SPEAKER_00: 20:52

Yeah, um, I I love that, Jeremy. The levels of questions is so important. There's some places where teachers can start off right away to get some more information about inquiry. Yeah, the Department of Education at ADE, we put together a four-part series of webinars on inquiry, starting with just the basics of what is inquiry and why it's important, and ending with how do you assess using inquiry. So these are on-demand webinars that Linda over at ADE has put together, which are very helpful as a really good strong introduction. If you're an elementary teacher, there are some great resources. I'm going to focus on elementary for inquiry. Um, the first thing I want to talk to you about is this idea of the Library of Congress has some partner sites. And one of their partner sites is for elementary teachers, and it's called history mysteries. And history mysteries are historical inquiries of elementary classroom, and many of them also cover civics, geography, culture. And it starts off with introducing your students to the work of historians by getting them to start thinking like a historian about some artifacts, but then it has really well-aligned inquiry questions that teachers can start off exploring with their students and resources with it. So that would be a great place, I think, as an elementary teacher to start. And they have some little guides for teachers to get started as well. In addition, I would say that C3Teachers.org is a free resource, and it was put together with Race from the Top Money, started in New York, and it was after the C3 framework came out for social studies, and basically it uses an inquiry design model that creates inquiries, two to three-day inquiries for grades kindergarten through 12th grade. And you can search for them, you can look at them, you can take a little piece of them, like an introductory lesson or resource to get you started with that. And then finally, Inquire Ed is a new resource that's out, and it is for uh K-5, and um, they are doing a lot of free webinars to introduce educators on how to ask questions, how to use primary sources with elementary school, age students, different ways to communicate your results. So I think just focusing on elementary, there's a plethora of resources that have come about because of the need for elementary teachers to have these resources.

SPEAKER_02: 23:29

Yeah, I actually was gonna name the C3 framework, Tammy, then I also will agree that that is an excellent resource to start just diving into both the pedagogy behind inquiry-based learning, but then also resources that teachers can readily take and start implementing within their classroom for different inquiry-based lessons. So I'll just add on a few other different resources, one of them being the five E framework, which essentially is a process for students to undertake in terms of exploring inquiry. So, for example, the first E is engage, and that would be as the teacher, that curation of materials and having your students engage with those materials or engage with questions to start your lesson. Students then go into explore, where they're going to have their own time, their own space to explore those materials or a deeper dive into those inquiry questions, followed by explain. And so this is really that bridge, which I think we speak to in the Costa webinar or excuse me, the Costa podcast, where we have students transition from um kind of that level one into that level two, where they're now going to take in of themselves the resources and how they are internalizing those resources and understanding those resources, and then being able to explain how these resources impact them or their learning. The fourth E is to elaborate. And so again, taking it to that third level of cost is thinking, where they're now going to be elaborating upon whatever those resources or inquiry-based questions are. And then the last E being evaluate. And again, that's you know, something that can follow through as a reflection post-lesson and have your students kind of evaluate their learning and their learning process that they engaged in. And again, that's the five E framework. And there's lots of you know free resources if you just had to Google that, that you can look at as an educator. One other um resource is facinghistory.org. I would say that this is similar, I think, probably to history mystery, but for a lot of the older grades, so middle school through high school, there are some elementary lessons on there. But I, as a middle school teacher, previously really found facinghistory.org a super helpful resource. And again, those are lessons that are just easily and readily adaptable and ready to use in your classroom as a teacher. The last resource I'll throw out there is the Pulitzer Center. And, you know, we might know that name, Pulitzer, as the you know, prize for journalism. There you have a center that's also very much geared towards public education around journalism, but they have an entire section and toolkit for inquiry learning for teachers in their classroom. And again, these are going to be both professional development for teachers, but then lessons that teachers can take and implement within their classroom. And they're all very much inquiry-based, but also aimed at increasing students' global competency of understanding the world around them, which I think ties really nicely back to the EAD framework. But then also the critical thinking and communication skills, which of course we want to have our students engaged in in the classroom as well.

SPEAKER_04: 26:34

This is exciting. All of these websites I have pulled up, and I'm, I think one of the things I'm most excited here is that there's so much for elementary teachers because elementary teachers, you know, are responsible to be generalists. They have to know everything. And a lot of times the sciences and the social studies get put on the back burner because of whatever fee testing happens. And so just looking at these quickly, there are very specific lessons for every grade level. So I will make sure all of those are in the show notes for everyone. I have one last question. So we've talked about teachers, we've talked about classrooms. How does inquiry, though, help students be on the classroom? Because really, I think as teachers, you know, we want to help them as much as we can in their classroom, but really the mark of good education is what happens outside the classroom. So whether that's after school hours or even after they've, you know, left your grade level, how can this help students be on the classroom?

SPEAKER_02: 27:32

I think that really is the crux of education, right? Like what is it that we want our students to carry forth? And we can definitely say it's not just rote memorization of like static facts and figures and history. Yes, that's great to know, but in terms of action, you know, beyond our classroom and beyond their K-12 learning experiences, I'm actually going to return to kind of our opening conversation of that, you know, concept of empty vessels as students. And we don't want our students to go out into the world as these empty vessels just simply filled up with factoids without any type of connection or experiencing, you know, um experimenting and connecting those factoids to their greater understanding of the world around them. So I think this also drives home kind of the heart of our democracy in that we want our students to be critical thinkers. We want our students to be civically engaged, whether that's in their community or in some type of political venture or electorally, where they're showing up to vote and have an informed vote at that. And so this really is important, I think, to just sustaining a lot of our democratic processes and procedures that we have here within the US. And really a lot of these skills that are taught through the inquiry framework are things that will serve students in future careers. And again, you know, not just in the societal impact, but also, you know, economic impacts that we might see students being able to weigh factual evidence and you know, traverse multi-narrative accounts and come up with their own informed um opinions and knowledges. And so this really is, I think, an important, you know, inquiry-based learning is just an important tenet of you know, education, really in of itself.

SPEAKER_00: 29:20

Just to add to that, when students leave our classroom, they are going to have to solve problems that we don't even know about and create solutions to that, those problems. And inquiry teaches students to use curiosity, it teaches them to explore, to both creatively and critically think. It teaches them how to read and analyze, it teaches them how to communicate, which is essential in every aspect of their life, even if they're trying to communicate and persuade their parents to loan them a car for the weekend, right? Learning inquiry skills can help them to do any type of persuasion. And one of the things that I've seen inquiry do is really develop media literacy skills in students, because now students question, they uh search for answers, they weigh, they think about how do I make sure that this is accurate? What sources am I looking at? So you're creating um students who are also going to be able to transfer those skills not only to college career, but also to civic life, being able to analyze uh news sources, being able to solve problems in their communities. And I think inquiry helps students immensely, um, no matter what career they go into, no matter where they are. They're always going to be citizens with a small C trying to work through issues. Within our own community.

SPEAKER_01: 30:47

Trevor Burrus, Yeah. I'll just build on that by saying that if you're sitting back and you're seeing things unfold, and you you would naturally, as a citizen, as a as an active participant in our civic life, you would want to, you would recognize the need to learn about it. You would recognize the need to understand it in order that you can or can choose not to take action about it and in what way. And so by teaching our students not only to ask good questions and then teaching them how to go about using that for a purpose, we're we're teaching, it sounds corny, but it's absolutely true. We're teaching them not only in knowledge, not only in skills, but in habits and dispositions to be the active citizens and informed citizens, those two things being, you know, have a having a reciprocal and mutually supportive relationship with one another. That's what we're trying to teach them to be. I think we can't ever lose sight of that.

SPEAKER_04: 31:52

Wonderful. We have so many resources to share, so many resources, but I think we need to find a good place on the internet to put them all, which is something that I will be working on. Thank you again. I always enjoy chatting with the three of you. We have more episodes coming up. We are excited to share the work that we are doing. Is there any last minute things that we want to throw out there for our listeners about inquiry-based learning?

SPEAKER_00: 32:28

Don't feel overwhelmed by having to do everything. Start small and start with the teaching your students how to ask questions and explore through questions.

SPEAKER_01: 32:53

This is something that you to which you must commit and you have to, you have to start small and you have to be deliberate, you have to be intentional and you have to be committed. And that doesn't mean you throw out your lesson plan book and say, okay, I'm burning all the old stuff because we're going to be all inquiry. It's like, no, no, no. You start small and you find ways to weave more of this approach into what you are doing until such point that maybe there are things that you have you have thrown away, but it's something that's happened over time. You you're not going to ask them to do this overnight. This is something that you have to build up over time because it is. It is building knowledge, it's building skills, and it's building habits. So it's going to take a commitment and it's going to take time, but that's also where the payoff is. It's not something that you have to do over a short-term period of time.

SPEAKER_02: 33:44

I echo both Tammy and Jeremy's advice on implementing inquiry. And I think I'll I'll leave you more on a high note in that. It's it's fun. It really is fun for you as the teacher. Instead of being, you know, the sage on the stage and speaking to students the entire class period or time around a lesson. You take the backseat and you see your students drive the lesson. And I think that it's really rewarding to, as Jeremy said, when your students are at that point and you've done it enough and you're comfortable and your students are comfortable with it, it really is a fun and rewarding experience.

SPEAKER_04: 34:21

Fantastic. Well, again, thank you all so much, and we will see you for the next episode.