"Inquiry Learning for the Individual Learner"

 , thanks for sharing your thoughts about choice and options for students in the classroom.  I affirm your emphasis of student choice; at the end of last year, quite unexpectedly, a student shared a note with me, thanking me for allowing for many opportunities to pursue topics of personal interest within the various lessons and units.  I see student choice as an intuitive feature of the classroom, since the class cannot look at every topic from history in great detail.  If we set the table well, students are invited to identify, select, or create dishes that are appealing to them.  In your talk, you mentioned curating and making many resources available for students; would you share an example of this for the group?  Do you provide various PDFs on a Google Classroom or do you have physical sources in the classroom for students to use?  Do you control the sources or to what extent do students find their own sources in support inquiry?  

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  • I have also found a 3D printer to be a valuable resource for creating replicas to use in the classroom.  I also recently purchased a replica of Indiana Jone's notebook for the holy grail with the intention…

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  • One example of this is an activity that I took from the Origins Course in Unit 7.  This is the UN Sustainable Development Goals Activity.  This activity is great because the resources are already organized on the UN website so I didn't have to curate resources for students but they still had a vast amount of choice built into the activity and through inquiry they narrow down to a specific goal and develop an action plan to have an impact on achieving that goal.  

    Another activity I had students complete asked them to explore the concept of Total War. For this activity students needed to explore various topics related to total war.  As a class we used the WHP article, World War I: A total war to introduce the topic and give the students a common ground to start from.  After we read and discussed the article as a class and in small groups students were asked to identify an aspect of Total War and explore it in more detail using that information to create an item from the choices board to represent what was learned. At this point I provided students with access to a variety of resources including primary source accounts, articles, videos, movie clips, images, etc....

  •  Thanks for the examples.  You provide students with a link to explore further (UN) and you provide a listing of specific sources (WWI).  I try to challenge myself to have hard copies, objects, sources in class so students can hold them, refer to them, discuss them (I try to get their eyes on something other than the computer screen); this requires much more work for the teacher.  

  • I have also found a 3D printer to be a valuable resource for creating replicas to use in the classroom.  I also recently purchased a replica of Indiana Jone's notebook for the holy grail with the intention of creating a sort of engaging escape room activity and making a connection to historical context for movies.  

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  • I have also found a 3D printer to be a valuable resource for creating replicas to use in the classroom.  I also recently purchased a replica of Indiana Jone's notebook for the holy grail with the intention of creating a sort of engaging escape room activity and making a connection to historical context for movies.  

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