The Inquiry Design Model – Conceptual Principles: Disciplinary knowledge and skills are integrated within an investigation
I have stopped buying my niece and nephew presents. I know, I know. I’m a horrible aunt, right? What I do instead is give them each a coupon for a date with their Aunt Carly to do whatever they want. This past week, my four-year-old nephew and I spent the afternoon together. He wanted to bake a cake. I know what you’re thinking….that sounds like a fun day for him, a complete mess for me to clean up.
We went to the grocery and he picked out everything he wanted for the cake. Now, I didn’t just hand him the ingredients and say, “have at it!” I gave him the measuring cups, helped him scoop out the appropriate amounts, but he poured them in the bowl, cracked the eggs, and whisked it all together. When it was cooled, he spread the icing and decorated it with, what seemed like, a mountain of sprinkles. When all was said and done, it was messier than if I had made it by myself. It wasn’t going to appear on the cover of any baking magazine…more likely a “Pinterest Fail” page.
I could have just made him watch me do everything. Ultimately, I know the end game for him was to be able to eat cake. It certainly would have been a faster, cleaner process. The measuring would have been more exact and there wouldn’t have been any eggshells in the batter. He would have still told his parents that he made the cake, even though I would have been the one doing all the work. Instead, with my guidance, he was learning about baking and how to bake.
As teachers, we bear a great burden in terms of achieving results in our students’ educational growth. Social studies teachers especially can feel overwhelmed by the pressure to cover an ever-expanding content base, while also purposefully integrating disciplinary skills. The list of requirements seems daunting – and like a zero sum game.
Indeed, while working with pre-service teachers, one expressed concerns about how to implement innovative pedagogical techniques and also address the content demands.
“I don’t want to do a lecture, but how else do I know they have the information?” They feel the list of demands weighing down on them – the pressure to have the students create a wedding-quality, five-tiered cake.
The third assumption of the C3 Framework’s Inquiry Design Model is that knowledge and skills are a part of the inquiry’s investigation. “Skills and knowledge in isolation have little value.” Unless our goal is to educate to improve our students’ chances on Jeopardy, it is vital that we consider what we want students to do with information being taught. If we want the content knowledge to have meaning—shape their intellectual abilities—they must do something with that knowledge, rather than recite it. “[P]articipation in a process of generating and critiquing the past serves to provide the basis for the acquisition of historical knowledge and understanding” (VanSledright, 2008, p. 136). Lecturing leads to memorization. Skills-based tasks lead to growth in understanding and critical thinking – it leads to their ability to think and reason through the disciplinary lenses of history, economics, geography, etc.
Though lecturing feels comfortable since we, as teachers, feel that we are controlling the information students are absorbing, to truly be effective and cultivate the abilities of our students, we need to have the courage to release the reins and let them explore the content – all with appropriate guidance. I didn’t make the cake for my nephew because I knew having him do all the steps would (1) improve his baking skills, (2) give him real ownership in the product, and (3) he would have more fun in the process.
Though doing an inquiry can feel messier than direct instruction, and it might not get the most aesthetically pleasing results (see below), it allows content knowledge and skills to develop together. When I took my nephew home, cake in tow, he described to his mom everything he did in the baking process. Then, he was able to share his cake with his family.
Much better present than a toy, right?
