Over the summer, I attended – as an “intern” or fledgling facilitator, the Illinois Writing Project Summer Leadership Institute.  It was, of course, a great experience.  While our group was a little smaller than usual (for various reasons), it was a powerful teaching and learning experience.  It helped me remember that my favorite thing to teach, and learn, is writing.  It’s such a powerful tool for so many things.  Some day, I hope that I can have a chance to focus just on the teaching of writing again, as I did when I taught writing in college as a grad assistant, but for now, it’s put to the service of content-area learning.  As you know, I teach science and social studies, and writing is not directly in my path, so to speak.  It’s not in my job title.  However, it’s an effective means to that end, and one of my favorite teaching and learning tools.  Heck – it is my favorite.

One of my other interests, or perhaps “goal” would be a more accurate word, has been inquiry instruction.  What I mean by “inquiry” is best defined as student-led instruction, or an instructional model built around the pursuit of student curiosity and interest.  Students are encouraged to develop and pursue answers to their own questions in relation to a topic.  The teacher becomes less an instructional leader and more of a mentor, guide, or emergency service for stranded or wandering students.

This is where the two above ideas come together.  To assess or find out what students have learned in an inquiry setting, teachers ask them to produce or present some kind of explanation or summary of their learning.  Here is the writing.  In some sense, inquiry becomes a cousin of the Writing Workshop model, almost a Science Workshop or a Social Studies Workshop.  This appears to be backwards – inquiry learning goes back at least to the 1960’s (and earlier, I believe, though I can’t find the source that shows that).  Writing Workshop is newer, and combining the two is kind of obvious for some, I think (since students are asked to work independently and then present their learning, often in writing).  For me, though, workshop is an established model that I’ve used successfully in my (former) Language Arts classroom.  Taking that approach in science and social studies is harder, since there is so much more to teach that is harder to learn independently (or it seems that way, doesn’t it?).  It helps me make sense of the switch, more than anything.

Perhaps the biggest obstacle to this approach is the difference between asking students to write, and asking students to conduct research and then write.  Especially in science, a student’s literacy skills might be unequal to their questioning skills.  I’ve already experienced watching students struggle with questions like, “What is Dark Matter?” or “How does cancer start?”  Both of these are interesting and appropriate science questions, but there are limited resources available that address these questions in a way that is intelligible to a middle-school student.

Maybe my role, then, is a locator and provider of readable or comprehensible resources.