This past week I've been doing a more intense inquiry experiment with my physical science class. Because of my focus on trying to get the students to think and plan more thoroughly, we've been taking multiple days on background research and procedure design. I've been getting mixed results on this. Part of the issue appears to be that the research and planning isn't as fun or exciting, and part appears to be the students' lack of an idea of what I'm looking for. I've tried to relate this back to lab instructions they've received in the past, and we've done some examples of writing instructions for other purposes (building shapes out of tangrams was a fun activity to show how much detail is necessary). We'll end this inquiry with a lab report and a poster, which hopefully will give the students plenty of time to think about their results.
My other physical science class (half block) is starting their inquiry about forces. This class is having a little bit of trouble with the creative thought necessary to design an experiment. We've tried classwide structured brainstorming activities, but two groups came back the next day not liking their idea from the first day, and started back at square one with little willingness to try again. The experimental design aspect appears to be working well, though.
I've also got an inquiry coming up for my chemistry students, who've been hard at work on content and book work for a while. We'll be doing an example lab about polarity of substances, and from there we'll be doing some individual experiments.
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