Today's students need to be fully prepared for successful learning and living in the information age. This book provides a practical, flexible framework for designing Guided Inquiry that helps achieve that goal. Guided Inquiry prepares today's learners for an uncertain future by providing the education that enables them to make meaning of myriad sources of information in a rapidly evolving world. The companion book, Guided Inquiry: Learning in the 21st Century, explains what Guided Inquiry is and why it is now essential now. This book, Guided Inquiry Design: A Framework for Inquiry in Your School, explains how to do it. The first three chapters provide an overview of the Guided Inquiry design framework, identify the eight phases of the Guided Inquiry process, summarize the research that grounds Guided Inquiry, and describe the five tools of inquiry that are essential to implementation. The following chapters detail the eight phases in the Guided Inquiry design process, providing examples at all levels from pre-K through 12th grade and concluding with recommendations for building Guided Inquiry in your school. The book is for pre-K–12 teachers, school librarians, and principals who are interested in and actively designing an inquiry approach to curricular learning that incorporates a wide range of resources from the library, the Internet, and the community. Staff of community resources, museum educators, and public librarians will also find the book useful for achieving student learning goals.

This dynamic approach to an exciting form of teaching and learning will inspire students to gain insights and complex thinking skills from the school library, their community, and the wider world. Guided inquiry is a way of thinking, learning, and teaching that changes the culture of a school into a collaborative inquiry community. Global interconnectedness calls for new skills, new knowledge, and new ways of learning to prepare students with the abilities and competencies they need to meet the challenges of a changing world. The challenge for the information-age school is to educate students for living and working in this information-rich technological environment. At the core of being educated today is knowing how to learn and innovate from a variety of sources. Through guided inquiry, students see school learning and real life meshed in meaningful ways. They develop higher order thinking and strategies for seeking meaning, creating, and innovating. Today's schools are challenged to develop student talent, coupling the rich resources of the school library with those of the community and wider world. How well are you preparing your students to draw on the knowledge and wisdom of the past while using today's technology to advance new discoveries in the future? This book is the introduction to guided inquiry. It is the place to begin to consider and plan how to develop an inquiry learning program for your students.

Supplying classroom-tested lessons and unit plans that can serve as templates, this book demonstrates exactly how to integrate and implement Guided Inquiry Design® (GID) theory into practice. Guided Inquiry is an approach that many educators—thought leaders and practitioners alike—are finding to be well-suited to information-age learning and a way to meet Common Core Standards. For many teachers, librarians, middle school leaders, and curriculum specialists, the biggest challenge is finding examples of guided inquiry in practice applicable to their own context. This guide offers an easy solution, offering ready-to-use templates and models for implementing Guided Inquiry Design® (GID) in the middle school learning environment. With each supplied lesson laid out according to the session plan templates from GID and a thorough description of the ideal inquiry process from beginning to end, integration and implementation of GID is attainable. Besides showing how to put GID to best use to achieve five kinds of learning through inquiry, the book provides an explicit structure for developing instructional partnerships and collaborative teams within the school and with the larger community. It enables teachers, school librarians, and other educational partners to consider and plan for achieving outcomes that bring about deep understanding while also addressing curricular goals. Readers will be better equipped to provide an authentic learning environment using collaboration, discussion, and reflection embedded in the sessions, thereby helping their students to be able to think creatively to solve problems.

What is understanding and how does it differ from knowledge? How can we determine the big ideas worth understanding? Why is understanding an important teaching goal, and how do we know when students have attained it? How can we create a rigorous and engaging curriculum that focuses on understanding and leads to improved student performance in today's high-stakes, standards-based environment? Authors Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe answer these and many other questions in this second edition of Understanding by Design. Drawing on feedback from thousands of educators around the world who have used the UbD framework since its introduction in 1998, the authors have greatly revised and expanded their original work to guide educators across the K-16 spectrum in the design of curriculum, assessment, and instruction. With an improved UbD Template at its core, the book explains the rationale of backward design and explores in greater depth the meaning of such key ideas as essential questions and transfer tasks. Readers will learn why the familiar coverage- and activity-based approaches to curriculum design fall short, and how a focus on the six facets of understanding can enrich student learning. With an expanded array of practical strategies, tools, and examples from all subject areas, the book demonstrates how the research-based principles of Understanding by Design apply to district frameworks as well as to individual units of curriculum. Combining provocative ideas, thoughtful analysis, and tested approaches, this new edition of Understanding by Design offers teacher-designers a clear path to the creation of curriculum that ensures better learning and a more stimulating experience for students and teachers alike.

Want to make learning more meaningful in your classroom? Looking to better prepare your students for the world of tomorrow? Keen to help learners create authentic connections to the world around them? Dive into Inquiry beautifully marries the voice and choice of inquiry with the structure and support required to optimise learning for students and get the results educators desire. With Dive into Inquiry you'll gain an understanding of how to best support your learners as they shift from a traditional learning model into the inquiry classroom where student agency is fostered and celebrated each and every day. This book strikes a perfect balance of meaningful pedagogy, touching narrative, helpful processes, original student examples, and rich how-to lesson plans all to get you going on bringing inquiry into your classroom. After reading this book educators will feel equipped to design their own inquiry units in a scaffolded manner that promote a gradual shift of control of learning from the teacher to the learner. Exploring student passions, curiosities, and interests and having these shape essential questions, units of study, and performance tasks are all covered in this powerful book. Learn to keep track of the many inquiry topics in your classroom and have students take ownership over their learning like never before! Trevor MacKenzie provides readers with a strong understanding of the Types of Student Inquiry and proposes a framework that best prepares both educators and learners for sharing the unpacking of curriculum in the classroom as they work together towards co-constructing a strong Free Inquiry unit. Helpful illustrations for in-class use, examples of essential questions from a variety of disciplines, practical goals for making progress in adopting inquiry into your practice, and powerful student learning on display throughout, Dive into Inquiry will energize, inspire, and transform your classroom!

Humans, especially children, are naturally curious. Yet, people often balk at the thought of learning scienceâ€"the "eyes glazed over" syndrome. Teachers may find teaching science a major challenge in an era when science ranges from the hardly imaginable quark to the distant, blazing quasar. Inquiry and the National Science Education Standards is the book that educators have been waiting forâ€"a practical guide to teaching inquiry and teaching through inquiry, as recommended by the National Science Education Standards. This will be an important resource for educators who must help school boards, parents, and teachers understand "why we can't teach the way we used to." "Inquiry" refers to the diverse ways in which scientists study the natural world and in which students grasp science knowledge and the methods by which that knowledge is produced. This book explains and illustrates how inquiry helps students learn science content, master how to do science, and understand the nature of science. This book explores the dimensions of teaching and learning science as inquiry for K-12 students across a range of science topics. Detailed examples help clarify when teachers should use the inquiry-based approach and how much structure, guidance, and coaching they should provide. The book dispels myths that may have discouraged educators from the inquiry-based approach and illuminates the subtle interplay between concepts, processes, and science as it is experienced in the classroom. Inquiry and the National Science Education Standards shows how to bring the standards to life, with features such as classroom vignettes exploring different kinds of inquiries for elementary, middle, and high school and Frequently Asked Questions for teachers, responding to common concerns such as obtaining teaching supplies. Turning to assessment, the committee discusses why assessment is important, looks at existing schemes and formats, and addresses how to involve students in assessing their own learning achievements. In addition, this book discusses administrative assistance, communication with parents, appropriate teacher evaluation, and other avenues to promoting and supporting this new teaching paradigm.

POGIL is a student-centered, group learning pedagogy based on current learning theory. This volume describes POGIL's theoretical basis, its implementations in diverse environments, and evaluation of student outcomes.

Practicing librarians and library educators demonstrate the power of inquiry to achieve the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and promote school librarians as key partners in implementing this type of critical teaching and learning in K–12 schools. With the adoption of the CCSS in most of the nation's schools, educators and administrators at K–12 schools have a pressing need to find the best ways to implement these rigorous and comprehensive standards that challenge students to understand informational text and digital content at increasing levels of complexity. This text provides faculty with much-needed support in achieving this critical goal, thoroughly describing inquiry learning and how it links to the CCSS. The authors—nearly 30 contributors total, comprising librarians, library media specialists, educational leaders, teachers from the kindergarten level to college professors, and administrators, each with direct experience and knowledge regarding the subject matter—explain how the standards' emphasis on in-depth investigation and evidence-based reading and writing skills dovetail perfectly with inquiry-based learning initiatives. Acclaimed thought leaders such as Jean Donham, Kristin Fontischiaro, Leslie Maniotes, and Barbara Stripling clearly define and illuminate the librarian's role in school initiatives today and share lesson plans that have been proven effective in actual practice.

This full-color book provides a practical approach to incorporating graphic inquiry across the curriculum for school library media specialists, technology coordinators, and classroom teachers. It's new. It's graphic. And it is the first of its kind. Designed to bridge theory and actual practice, Graphic Inquiry contains applications for new and practicing educators and librarians that can truly bring classroom learning into the 21st century. This visually rich book provides numerous, standards-based inquiry activities and projects that incorporate traditional materials as well as emerging social and collaborative technologies. This full-color book provides real-world strategies for integrating graphic inquiry across the curriculum and is specifically designed to help today's educators identify tools and techniques for using graphic inquiry with their students. Although research is cited and references are provided, lengthy text passages are avoided in favor of practical, visual examples rooted in best practice and presented in graphic format. Readers will view this book as a quick reference to timely, realistic activities and approaches as compared to a traditional textbook.