I’ve been using the C3 Inquiry Design Model (IDM) for over a decade. Generally speaking, I’ve felt successful and have shared my best practices with others in the field. But despite my students’ success in producing rich products from their work on formative performance tasks, arguments, and taking informed actions, the sensory experience of walking into my classroom did not reflect the intellectual energy that I knew was pulsing in my students’ heads. It was just unnervingly quiet most days. In the past, I might have responded by using a collaborative learning arrangement, a jigsaw, or a turn-and-talk to get my students talking. But these old-school pedagogies seemed mechanical compared to what’s possible with inquiry. So, why was my classroom so quiet?
I’ve noticed that discussion seems common in staging and taking informed action. Discussion is certainly important to these tasks, but I wanted more than the bookends of an inquiry. My goal was to push the formative performance tasks to be more discussion oriented. I wanted discussion in the context of disciplinary tasks, and I found a new opportunity with the Library of Congress’ “Primary Source Analysis Tool.” This tool provided me with a starting point for scaffolding student discussion in a classroom. I wanted to promote this tool to support academic discussion as part of students’ task work. For me it was all about students’ doing their formative task work through discussion.
To accomplish my goals, I developed an Inquiry Discussion Guide for using the LOC Primary Source Analysis Tool. The questions in my guide are phrased for students and aimed at encouraging discussion. The questions function as a beginning point to promote casual discussion relating primarily to the historical thinking skills of sourcing, comparison, basic causation, and contextualization.
My goal in developing this guide is to help students think in more complex ways. I used Webb’s Depth of Knowledge Framework, and my questions aim to move students from the levels 1 and 2 up to level 4 on the Depth of Knowledge Framework. The questions in the first section of my guide foster the application of historical thinking skills. Other questions in my guide continue to push students to think in more complex ways. I organized my Inquiry Discussion Guide as a checklist for teachers to track the development of their skills more efficiently. For me, it’s about using questions to move students toward argumentation.
I have implemented this tool with my students in a high school World History classroom and feel good about the outcomes. I asked my students to practice using questions on a regular basis, and it has worked. My students got to know each other better and did that in the context of using primary sources. Imagine that! For the past month, we have been using my tool for all our formative performance tasks. We’ve used the tool to build recall of related content, share individual perspectives, and test argumentation skills in a low-stakes format. While it is too early to tell for sure, I can say that I’ve already observed greater endurance in sustained argumentative writing among my students. That’s a success for me!
