Two Weeks In: I Built an Inquiry Model: Then I Gave It to Actual Students

I spent a good portion of my summer designing what I thought was a pretty good inquiry model.

Then I made one critical mistake. I gave it to actual students. Actual students, it turns out, occasionally have opinions about our carefully designed instructional models.

Two weeks into the school year, I'm beginning to see what InquiryQuest looks like when it leaves the planning document and enters a real classroom.

And, as you might expect, it doesn't look exactly the way it did on paper.

Three Courses, Three Different Starting Points

My strongest early results are coming from my AP Government seniors.

That's an important qualifier. They're AP students.

Many of these same students were relatively quiet last year. They completed their work and generally did what was expected. You might even say they were...compliant.

This year, something is different.

During our first InquiryQuest, they're talking to each other with purpose. They're making connections between evidence and our questions. They're using their inquiry team roles, even when their "team" consists of only two or three students.

Most encouragingly, they're asking questions of one another.

Not because I told them to ask a question. Because they want to understand what someone else is thinking. That's a change.

My AP U.S. History juniors are at a different starting point.

They're also AP students, but many have never been asked to think through something with this many layers. Have they written CERs before? Absolutely. But the CER was usually the assignment.

Now it's the extension of something deeper. Before they get there, they're investigating questions, working through multiple discoveries, examining evidence, making connections, assuming roles, and figuring out what they actually think. When I've asked students what they think about InquiryQuest, I've heard variations of the same response:

"It's a lot." "It's multiple steps." "It's a different way of doing things that we need to get used to."

That last comment has stayed with me. And then there's Sociology.

This isn't an AP course, and the experience has been different.

These students have been much less interested in discussion. When given the choice, many would rather work independently. At first, that concerned me. If I'm trying to build an inquiry classroom and students aren't talking to each other, is the inquiry actually working?

Then I started looking more closely at what they were writing.

The "worksheets" I'm giving them aren't traditional worksheets. They're built around inquiry. Students are being asked to apply ideas, make connections, examine situations from different perspectives, and explain their reasoning.

And some of them are doing exactly that.

They're quiet. They're working independently. But their responses are deep enough that I can see the thinking happening.

Others aren't there yet. They're answering the questions, but their responses remain closer to the surface. Those students need a more structured pathway into the same kind of thinking. That has complicated a question I've been thinking about a lot lately:

What does thinking actually look like?

Maybe it doesn't always look like a room full of students talking.

And maybe a quiet student completing a worksheet isn't necessarily being compliant rather than learning.

It depends on what the worksheet is asking the student to think about, and what the response reveals about the thinking that occurred.

Maybe Inquiry Has to be learned

That comment from my AP students keeps coming back to me:

It's a different way of doing things that we need to get used to.

Maybe that's exactly right.

Maybe inquiry isn't simply something teachers use.

Maybe inquiry is something students have to learn how to do.

We can't spend years teaching students that school means following directions, completing an assignment, turning it in, and moving on, then suddenly hand them an open-ended inquiry and expect the transition to be seamless.

A paradigm shift requires repetition.

Students need repeated opportunities to question, investigate, collaborate, make connections, reconsider ideas, and defend their thinking before those behaviors begin to feel like a normal part of learning, and different students are going to need different levels of structure along the way. I'm learning something about the InquiryQuest design, too.

I originally envisioned an InquiryQuest as something that would exist within a larger unit of study.

At least with these first InquiryQuests, that isn't what happened.

InquiryQuest 1 became the unit

The content, evidence, discussion, skill development, and argumentation are happening through the inquiry rather than alongside it. Will that always be true? Probably not. The length and complexity of the content will matter.

But it's an important discovery two weeks in.

So, Is the Thinking Happening?

That's the question I've been asking myself.

And right now, my answer is yes. Not everywhere. Not at the same depth. And not always in the same way. Some students are talking, questioning, and making connections with each other. Some are still figuring out how to navigate a very different way of learning. Some are showing me their thinking quietly, through what they write. And some need more structure before they can get there.

Is it clean? No.

But I didn't expect a paradigm shift to look polished after two weeks.

If we're asking students to learn differently, repetition matters. Inquiry can't be the special activity we occasionally pull out and expect students to immediately know how to navigate.

Two weeks in, the inquiry isn't clean.

But the thinking is happening.

And right now, that's exactly where I hoped we'd be.