Anglophone group

Hello everyone!

For those of you who couldn't join us for @Alex Black's masterclass last week, I wanted to share a few ideas that I found particularly interesting.

I think this is something we can all relate to. We want our students to be curious, to ask questions, explore ideas and really understand what they're learning. But we also have a curriculum to cover, objectives to meet and never quite enough time!

What I particularly liked about Alex's approach is that inquiry doesn't have to be something extra that we try to squeeze into our lessons. It can be part of how we teach the curriculum.

A few ideas that stayed with me:

🔹 Find out what students think they know before explaining. Ask them to make a prediction and, more importantly, explain why they think that. It's amazing what we can discover about their understanding!

🔹 Make their thinking visible. Give students opportunities to share their ideas, test them and sometimes discover that what they thought was true isn't quite right. Alex showed us how powerful that moment of surprise can be for learning.

🔹 Inquiry doesn't mean leaving students to discover everything on their own. We still have an important role in guiding their thinking, introducing concepts and helping them make connections.

I also really appreciated the practical examples Alex used. We were invited to make our own predictions, and it certainly made me think about how much more engaging learning becomes when we have to work things out for ourselves!

The replay is now available in our InTA Professional Learning Hub, so do have a look if you missed it.

And I'd love us to continue the conversation here.

✍️How do you make time for inquiry in your own classroom? Have you found ways to encourage students to do more of the thinking without feeling that you're falling behind with the curriculum?

Please share your experiences, ideas or even the challenges you're facing. That's exactly why we have this community, so we can learn from each other!