Teaching Inquiry

There are many things about teaching in the Learn Lab that excite me. For example, the ability to seamlessly transition into and out of using Excel will be particularly nice.

However, I have to say that the most exciting aspect of the Learn Lab is how the room supports inquiry. Traditional classrooms tend to lead to alienation – between learner and content and among the learners. The Learn Lab forces students to engage with one another. With carefully crafted curriculum and learner-centered instruction, I expect this to translate to eliminating the alienation between learn and content. This will be a result of the inquiry process.

With this in mind, I have redesigned my course materials to facilitate this process. My students – freshmen in a business math class – will be asked to work on open-ended problems beginning about half-way through the first semester. The task will not necessarily be to solve the problems, but to make progress. The expectation is that they will come up with a list of strategies that they can assess as they work. By the middle of the second semester, they will be expected to have some results from this process. I anticipate that the Learn Lab will facilitate this process nicely.