What is Inquiry Education?

Inquiry education is a form of education that is highly student-centered and focuses primarily on teaching students to ask questions and become critical thinkers and learners. While this type of education still involves a teacher and students, the roles of each can be quite different from a traditional classroom. The teacher in this type of classroom is often much more of a facilitator to the learning process and helps students ask questions and learn materials in their own way. Inquiry education is often focused more on the process and developing critical learning methods in students, than merely on knowledge acquisition and end results.

Also known as the inquiry method of learning, inquiry education tends to only be successful in an atmosphere where both the students and the teacher are committed to this type of learning. This is because the entire process of learning through inquiry education is dependent on the students asking questions and the teacher understanding how to answer those questions in an open way. The goal of inquiry education is often aimed more toward ensuring students develop into critical thinkers, than final results that track knowledge gained.

In other words, this type of learning is as much about the process of leaning as it is the information that is learned. A teacher may present an idea to students, expect that students will ask questions based on what is presented, and the class will then move into conversation and exploration about the subject based on those questions. Teachers using inquiry education methods and pedagogy are likely to produce a looser lesson plan for each day, allowing for plenty of room to explore the ideas and questions of students.

One of the primary goals of inquiry education is to ensure that students are able to ask questions and understand how those questions relate to the answer. For example, a student may ask about the causes of the American Civil War during a lesson on the war. Rather than simply giving an answer to the question, a teacher would provide a partial answer that would be open to more questions. Or the teacher may simply pose the question back to the class, to encourage discussion and explorative learning among the students.

This type of education requires fairly mature students who can handle the responsibility they have in the classroom. Since much of the learning process is guided by their questions and ideas, students could easily derail a class and prevent productive discussion and learning. This is why teaching students to be a participant in their own education is one of the principle goals of inquiry education. While the students ultimately do learn new materials, they also learn how to ask questions so that in the future they will understand how to learn and develop outside of the classroom.