Guided Inquiry (GI) is the framework that teachers and teacher librarians use to help their students deepen their understanding of curriculum content during the information search process.  It needs time for the students to be able to choose their own topic or question that will allow them to narrow their search process.  The advantages of using GI is the student engagement in their own learning that deepens their understanding.  Through collaboration with their teachers, teacher librarians and other students, metacognition skills are also developed which will help students in their lifelong learning journey.

The challenges of implementing GI is time and mindset.  Firstly, time to collaborate with the teacher in designing a GI that can be implemented in class and library time that fulfils the curriculum requirement takes planning.  Assessment of open ended assignments would also be more time consuming than that taken in assessing traditional research assignments. Time for the students to find their question after the opening, immersion, exploration phases would be a challenge.  I can only imagine that students would move through the exploration, identification and gathering phases at very different paces.  Some would know immediately and progress, while others might find some blind alleys and need more time.

Both the mindsets of the teacher and the students would also prove to be a possible challenge.  Convincing teachers with a closed mindset that there is another way to better results is not always easy, especially if they have been using the same topic based research projects for some time.  The students’ mindset that their ideas and questions are of value and the emotions that they are feeling during the information search process are normal could be challenging, especially if their independence and resilience is low.