A TL will probably move a school to a IL approach slowly. Begin with your most willing participant or grade team and plan from there. Sharing the advantages and the alignment with curriculum as well as offering to collaborate will motivate a team and Principal to be involved. Teacher education and sharing pre-written GI units to model the process as well as a scaffold such as the Guided Inquiry Design Process by Kuhlthau, C. C., Caspari, A. K., & Maniotes, L. K. (2015) will hopefully enable the process.
Challenges for this process can be allowing teachers time to consider the GI process and additional time to collaborate with colleagues. (Fitzgerald and Garrison, 2017) Teachers need to understand and support the process before valuable time will be allocated to plan GI units.
In the article, It Trains Your Brain (2017) students reflected that it became easier to follow the process with repeated projects. A practical approach might be to display the GID process clearly on the library wall and classroom walls as an available reference for the students and teachers. The Guided Inquiry units I have seen so far appear to be a full term in length (minimum 10+ lessons) I wonder if there are shorter, more manageable units of work that take less time that don’t loose the integrity of the GID steps? This might be a good place for the less confident TL and class teacher to begin?
Fitzgerald, L. & Garrison, K. (2017) ‘It Trains Your Brain’: Student Reflections on Using the Guided Inquiry Design Process. Synergy, 15/2
Kuhlthau, C. C., Caspari, A. K., & Maniotes, L. K. (2015). Guided Inquiry: Learning in the 21st Century, 2nd Edition : Learning in the 21st Century (Vol. Second edition). Santa Barbara, California: Libraries Unlimited. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.csu.edu.au/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=1061481&site=ehost-live
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