Sorensen, A. (2019). Guided inquiry in Stage 4 history: Collaboration between teacher-librarians and classroom teachers. Journal of the History Teachers’ Association of NSW (Dec) p.30-32.

I found this article as part of this module’s activities. It fits nicely with my own experiences as a history teacher and is relevant to my early plans for the third ETL401 assessment task.

I found it interesting that this article opened by considering the etymology of history – ‘historia’ – in order to the emphasise the potential of inquiry based learning in this subject area. This article broke down the key aspects of Guided Inquiry in an easy to understand format:

• Authentic task/audience
• Student choice
• Curiosity
• Questioning
• Reflection

It also referenced the 7 stages of a full Guided Inquiry unit – open, immerse, explore, identify, gather, share, create, evaluate – which helped me to get my head around the GI process.

The references to actual practice, with consideration of what worked and what didn’t, were particularly useful for me as I try to understand Guided Inquiry and plan my own unit for the assessment task. Strategies that worked included:

• hosting curated online research resources (pathfinders) and worksheets on the school’s LMS so that students can access them easily
• providing outlines of each lesson with directions for students
• collaboration between a) TLs and classroom teachers; b) students in each group; and c) high school and primary school students

Open/Immerse

• explicit teaching of the skills required to successfully complete each stage of the Guided Inquiry
• use of visuals to pique student interest (e.g. laminated images, snippets of text)

Explore/Identify/Gather

• students writing down a list of topics/ideas/people that the were interested in pursuing; staff collated these and used them to form groups based on student interest
• use of the Cornell notetaking method to record relevant information
• synthesis of notes using a Lotus Chart

Share/Create/Evaluate

• creation of a final product that was meaningful for students and displayed to create a sense of pride, belonging e.g. a picture book to read to a feeder primary class (creates authentic audience), paintings, models, posters
• evaluation of individual and group progress

Overall this article has given me an interesting account of how practitioners have implemented Guided Inquiry in their school context, and some of these strategies would no doubt work in my own school also. Interestingly, the notetaking worksheets would provide excellent evidence for accreditation, and these skills would be extremely useful to develop for a variety of student subject areas and serve our students well if they were confident in this area by the time they reached Stage 6.