Toucan 2000
Use of Inquiry in Teaching: 
An Analysis by Jewel Reuter

First we can determine the impact of teaching with inquiry on student learning:

When students are doing inquiry based science, an observer will see that:

Students View Themselves as Scientists in the Process of Learning.
1. They look forward to doing science.
2. They demonstrate a desire to 1earn more.
3. They seek to collaborate and work cooperatively with their peers.
4. They are confident in doing science; they demonstrate a willingness to modify ideas, take risks, and display healthy skepticism.

Students Accept an "Invitation to Learn" and Readily Engage in The Exploration Process.
1. Students exhibit curiosity and ponder observations.
2. They move around selecting and using the materials they need.
3. They take the opportunity and the time to "try out" their own ideas.

Students Plan and Carry Out Investigations.
1. Students design a way to try out their ideas, not expecting to be told what to do.
2. They plan ways to verify, extend or discard ideas.
3. They carry out investigations by: handling materials, observing, measuring, and recording data.

    Social anthropologists propose that systemic cultural change takes an average of 76 years to gain a wide spread foot hold. With regard to current educational reform, this suggests that we are at best midway into the most recent effort. But to make this current endeavor stick, while so many others have failed, will take more than biding our time and taking a "be patient attitude".

Students  Communicate Using a Variety of Methods.
1. Students express ideas in a variety of ways: journals, reporting out, drawing, graphing, charting, etc.
2. They listen, speak and write about science with parents, teachers and peers.
3. They use the language of the processes of science.
4. They communicate their level of understanding of concepts that they have developed to date.

 Students Propose Explanations and Solutions and Build a Store of Concepts.
1. Students offer explanations from a "store" of previous knowledge. (Alternative Frameworks, Gut Dynamics).
2. They use investigations to satisfy their own questions.
3. They sort out information and decide what is important.
4. They are willing to revise explanations as they gain new knowledge.

Students  Raise Questions
1. Students ask questions (verbally or through actions).
2. They use questions to lead them to investigations that generate further questions or ideas.
3. Students value and enjoy asking questions as an important part of science.

Students Use Observation.
1. Students observe, as opposed to just looking.
2. They see details, they detect sequences and events; they notice change, similarities and differences, etc.
3. They make connections to previously held ideas.

Students Critique Their Science Practices.
1. They use indicators to assess their own work
2. They report their strengths and weaknesses.
3. They reflect with their peers.

Inquiry: Learning from the Past with an Eye on the Future
by
Ronald J.  Bonnstetter
University of Nebraska, Lincoln

    Social anthropologists propose that systemic cultural change takes an average of 76 years to gain a wide spread foot hold. With regard to current educational reform, this suggests that we are at best midway into the most recent effort. But to make this current endeavor stick, while so many others have failed, will take more than biding our time and taking a "be patient attitude".

    Over the past 20 years we have seen numerous reform projects come and go. I would like to share my perception of at least part of the reason for these failures and then apply these insights to our most recent reform effort, the implementation of National Standards.

Learning from the Past

    As I reflect on past projects, I have observed at least three major phases that many teachers go through, or far too often, fail to go through. Phase I might be described by Harry Wong as "Doing what you have been doing, and getting what you have been getting". In other words, Phase I is simply the pre-reform effort phase. Of course, we as educators hope to move teachers to a new vision and this can result in Phase II.

    In Phase II, teachers are presented with a new teaching strategy, usually in the context of an afternoon or one day workshop. So armed with this new skill, but little else, they venture back to their classroom to try implementation or worse, write off the whole experience and tell colleagues seated near them that they already do that. What is immediately noticeable for those who at least think about possible implementation, is how these teachers internalize this new strategy and attempt to move it into practice. Their efforts many times result in an "all or none" approach. Take cooperative learning as an example. Phase I teachers employ traditional classroom presentations and may group for laboratories, but only as a convenience or due to equipment limitations. But Phase II teaching can be just as deadly. These teachers attempt to imbed their new learning into everything they do. So now we see cooperative groups for everything from labs to homework and guess what, it does not work. Phase II teachers quickly reach the conclusion that "this stuff is just another short term educational trend". And of course, based on their "N of 1" data, they quickly revert back to Phase I teaching. Oh yes, I might add that they also become very vocal spokespersons against this new reform and have personal experience to support those views.

    The missing link in the scenario described above requires staying with a reform effort long enough to reach Phase III. Phase III is where teachers reflect on

1. what they were doing that worked, and
2. how they might integrate these new ideas into their pre-workshop repertoire of teaching tools.

    The sad fact is that we far too often fail to invest either the time or the necessary resources to reach and build Phase III teachers. My personal experience suggests that on average it takes anywhere from three to five years for wide spread single component teacher behavior changes to be firmly implemented among a building faculty and from three to eight years with the same general educational reform agenda to accomplish anything close to systemic change.

    Please think about the implications of these statements and their interface with current inservice practice. For example National Science Foundation funding rarely views a project as valuable enough to fund beyond the fourth year and district agendas change with each new administrator or annual plan.

    So it is not enough to be on the right track and be presenting our teachers with solid research based practice. We must be prepared to invest the time and develop better inservice strategies to help teachers transition from Phase II skill oriented practitioners to full fledged Phase III teachers who have not only gained the skill but have reflected upon their own practice long enough to develop true integration.

Inquiry-based teaching: A case in point

    Inquiry learning and inquiry oriented teaching are not new science education concepts. What is new is the prominence inquiry has within the National Science Education Standards.

Teaching Standard A:

Teachers of science plan an inquiry-based science program for their students. In doing this, teachers

• Develop a framework of yearlong and short-term goals for students.
• Select science content and adapt and design curricula to meet the interests, knowledge, understanding, abilities, and experiences of students.
• Select teaching and assessment strategies that support the development of student understanding and nurture a community of science learners.
• Work together as colleagues within and across disciplines and grade levels.

    For those of you with T1 connections, you might enjoy viewing this one minute science activity and ask yourself, is this an inquiry lesson? Think about your answer as we move to the next discussion.

Does your Chewing Gum Loose it's Favor on the Bedpost Over Night (or simply after a few minutes of heavy chewing?)

    For several years now I have worked with a wonderful group of 7th through 12th grade science teachers in Alaska. This project has basically maintained the same reform focus for the past eight years. As a consequence we are seeing the kind of Phase III results previously discussed. But over the last few years we had tried to create a vision and implement wider use of inquiry-based teaching and student learning. For the most part these early efforts failed. Upon reflection, reasons include: presenting the theory and inquiry concept without a clear image of that theory in practice and failing to stick with inquiry as a major focus over time. But the real key to movement came with our efforts to examine the problem using a Phase III approach. The question became: What is needed to help teachers see more clearly what they are presently doing that is working and how this new national agenda fits in? Like most workshops that result in success, it was not so much what was planned as what the teachers did.

    A special three hour session was set aside to revisit this thing called inquiry. Our lesson plan called for using part of a North West Regional Laboratory film which breaks inquiry into different levels and then work in groups to examine examples of present practice and ways to further develop greater inquiry into current practice.

    One teacher, Mark Lyke, from Polaris K-12 School in Anchorage, took the content from that short film and developed a model for the group to explore. Since that day, I have used his original diagram and asked other teacher groups to review and revise this visual representation of the inquiry teaching and learning. I would like to share this evolving model in hopes that you might also help teachers see the connections to their present practice and in doing so, establish personal goals to move our nations science teachers on, what you will soon see as an inquiry teaching continuum.

Inquiry as an Evolutionary Process

Traditional Hands-on Science Experiences
    We are all familiar with these "cookbook" experiences. The Teacher directs the decision making from topic to conclusion. We also know that for some teachers this step would be a major improvement over their 45 minute daily lecture. So this is not bad science, it simply is not inquiry science.

Structured Science Experiences
    During a structured laboratory experience, students are required to reach their own conclusions based on supportive evidence. On the inquiry continuum providing a structured experience is a major step for both the teacher and their students. I mention students, because we must not forget that our students must go through the same basic developmental process as teachers.

Guided Inquiry
    Guided inquiry still has the teacher selecting the topic, the question, and providing the material, but students are required to design the investigation, analyze the results, and reach supportable conclusions. A recent teacher workshop suggested that both the teacher and the student be listed under the procedures and design section. They pointed out that many times we must fluctuate between teacher and student directed at these interface components.

Student Directed Inquiry
    At this point the student is responsible for everything beyond the general topic and maybe a little guidance with question development. I believe this is in fact the level of inquiry being suggested by the National Standards.

Student Research
    This is the inquiry ultimate goal. At this point the student simply needs support and guidance from the teacher. I do not believe that this is a goal to be met by all or even most of our students, but our teachers must understand how to help students who have both the interest, drive and ability to pursue true research. In other words, we must introduce our pre-service teacher to doing real research, if we ever hope to have them develop programs for their own students.

Teacher Controlled ---------------------------------------------------------------------------> Student Controlled

Exogenous >__________________> Cognitive Development >__________________> Endogenous

Focus on Teaching _____________________>______________________________> Focus on Learning

This process of moving from traditional to at least guided inquiry creates several very exciting end results. It alters the role of the teacher, the intellectual development of the students and even the classroom learning climate. The graph above shows how we can use inquiry to move toward more student centered classrooms and create a classroom where the focus is clearly on learning and not on the teacher teaching.

The cognitive growth may need a brief clarification. An exogenous cognitive change is externally driven, in this case by the teacher, and is measured by how well a student can reproduce what they have been told. An endogenous change, on the other hand, results in the internal reconstruction of new information and is measured by creativity and ones problem solving ability in new situations. All of these changes clearly align with many other aspects of our current educational reform efforts.

Conclusion
So replay the bubble gum video and determine at what level of inquiry this present lab might fall and more importantly, how would a teacher alter this one lab to make it "Guided" or even "Student Directed". Remember, you could be the teacher who lights the flame for an original research project.

As classroom teachers or teacher educators, we must take the time to reflect on our past efforts and make needed mid-course corrections. Looking for patterns within our reform projects and helping teachers see reform as an evolutionary process and not an either/or response, will help all of us grow as professionals and ultimately improve the education of our children.

More About Inquiry:  How Teaching Evolves to Inquiry
To have bona fide inquiry experiences, students must formulate their own questions, create hypotheses, and design investigations that test the hypotheses and answer the questions proposed. Published materials are generally too structured to provide the necessary freedom for students to engage in these important inquiry skills. However, to meet the expectations of the science standards, students need an opportunity to do self-directed inquiry learning that takes their curiosity and interest into account.

Students often need help initially to engage in authentic inquiry experiences. Neither teachers nor students know in advance the direction of the inquiry activity. Teachers may know the general category of the research students will undertake, but the specific direction of the research must be dictated by students' interest and desires. Students' attention can be focused upon a particular area of learning, but no direction should be given in advance about what will be studied. Students need to be directed to follow through the steps of the scientific method to solve problems they themselves have devised.

QUESTIONING
The first inquiry skill students need to learn is that of asking questions. Young children seem to have a never ending supply of questions. Older children, on the other hand, rarely ask questions, preferring instead to let their teachers perform this duty. They are more accustomed to providing memorized answers to questions asked by teachers. It can be safely said that this behavior is shaped by the educational system. The consequence of this conditioning process is well established in most learners once they have spent a few years in school and can significantly interfere with their ability to formulate questions and conduct self-directed investigations. Teachers interested in promoting inquiry have a challenging task to overcome the tendency of many older students to become passive.

There are three basic strategies for helping students ask questions. The first is to provide them with an observable phenomenon to ask questions about. Initially some coaching will be necessary. Teachers can, for example, ask students to focus their attention on a particular aspect of what they are asked to observe. This works best when the phenomenon being observed is active in some way. For example, in a demonstration in which a Florence flask is inverted over a burning candle anchored in a shallow pan of water, students will observe that the candle will burn for a time and eventually will be extinguished. Two different, related phenomena are commonly observed in connection with this demonstration. Sometimes the level of the water starts to slowly rise in the neck of the flask just as the candle is extinguished. Other times the water level starts to rise before the flame goes out and is the agent for extinguishing it. Students should be invited to formulate questions that occur to them as they watch and later to explain what they observed and suggest possible follow-up investigations.

A second strategy that promotes questioning is to have students read articles regarding interesting happenings in science. Appropriate articles can be found in newspapers and various science periodicals such as Science News and Scientific American. This activity can often stimulate extensive research by students on topics of interest. A dialogue between students and teacher will undoubtedly be necessary to begin the questioning process.

A third strategy for questioning calls for teachers to suggest possible topics for investigation. Typically the teacher asks the class what questions occur to them about a particular topic, perhaps the nature of and conditions for plant growth. To prepare for this inquiry activity, the teacher generates a list of possible investigations. These provide a background for the teacher to draw upon in offering cues about possible projects in case students' initial inquiry efforts are not fruitful. Suggestions would not be given directly to students. This list would consist of items like the following:

• What is the effect of temperature on the growth of different plant species?
• What is the effect of the amount of water on the growth of different plant species?
• What combinations of temperature and water provide ideal conditions for growth of different plant species?
• How does the amount of light affect the growth of different plant species?
• How does the length of day affect the growth of different plant species?
• What are the effects of different nutrients on plant growth?
• What are the tolerances of different plant species in terms of salinity, pH, and various nutrients?

CONDUCTING INVESTIGATIONS
Once students have decided on questions they wish to answer and hypotheses they wish to address, they should be encouraged to design experiments that test their hypotheses. In this effort they should be directed to apply proper controls and make careful measurements. This should be done with an eye to proper data collection and presentation of results to other class members. In each of these activities, the teacher should avoid excessive structure and encourage students to attend to the important aspects of their research design and data collection. Students should also be encouraged to look for possible confounding variables. The focus is on inquiry, not on transmitting science concepts to students.

As students conduct their experiments, the teacher should continue in a role of mentor or guide, giving as little direction as possible. Questions and issues can be brought up as situations demand. Every effort should be made to let students make decisions and draw conclusions. Students should also devise their own way to report their findings to other class members. They also may want to publicize their research beyond the classroom. One convenient place to do this is on the Internet. If the school has its own web site, students' research can be routinely placed online. The Internet also is a place they can look for ideas to investigate or to conduct background research for their projects.

When your students do laboratory activities, are they simply following directions, asking whether they are getting the "right answers," and not really learning much from the experience? Are you bored reading a hundred identical lab reports?

You probably agree with the tenets of inquiry-based instruction --- students asking and answering questions. Still, you're more comfortable and successful with the cookbook activities you've done before. You have the materials on hand. Having done the activities before, you know how long they'll take and typical difficulties students will have. To begin anew, finding different activities, and learning a new teaching style requires more time than you have --- teachers have many extra demands placed upon them.

The situation is far from ideal. But what can we do? Perhaps the school gave us a lab manual, or we feel we must cover a particular curriculum. Besides, open ended activities sound good in theory, but have you ever seen what happens if you try that? The kids have no idea what to do... there's chaos! |

In the most recent CSTA Journal, McComas ( 1997) described how "openness"--- the degree to which students make decisions about the problem, the procedure and/or the answers (p. 8) --- is often scarce during laboratory activities. He presented a table, reproduced below for classifying levels of laboratory openness.

 

Table 1. Schwab/Herron Levels of Laboratory Openness
LEVEL	PROBLEM	WAYS & MEANS	ANSWERS
O	Given	Given	Given
1	Given	Given	Open
2	Given	Open	Open
3	Open	Open	Open

A level 0 activity is one in which the teacher or lab manual decides the question or problem students will investigate, how students will do the investigation, and the validity of the investigation's results. Students make few decisions-other than deciding whether they got the "right answers."

A level 3 activity represents the other extreme. Students decide what to investigate, how to investigate it, and how to interpret the results they generate. Level 3 activities are what most scientists do; level 0 activities are what most students do.

 Modifying Laboratory Activities

So, what is the dedicated teacher to do? Gradually modify the activities you are already doing.

To begin, analyze activities by deciding who is making the decisions --- the teacher/text or the student. Choose a couple of "cookbook" activities. They should be activities designed for goals other than teaching students particular skills --- you may better teach skills with a more step-by-step approach.

Ask these questions:

• Who decides the questions students are to investigate-teacher or student?
• Who decides the procedure to follow answering the question-teacher or student?
• Who decides what to observe and data to collect-teacher or student?
• Who decides the response to the question(s) investigated-teacher or student?
• Who decides how to communicate this information, including data-teacher or student?

Analyzing most activities, the response to each question will be "teacher." On the other hand, the ideal of inquiry-based instruction is something close to that of teachers supervising student investigations. Teachers in these situations would respond "student" to most questions.

Begin changing procedures by taking a level 0 activity and making a few changes to make it more like a level 1 activity. The idea is to progressively make small changes in the activities your students do. Over the course of weeks or months, students move from doing level 0 activities to doing activities that seem more like level 2 or 3 activities. By then, they are figuring things out for themselves, interpreting results, perhaps even repeating procedures. In short, they are thinking-the way scientists do-about what they are doing!

Perhaps the easiest and best place to start is with modifying who decides how to communicate the information. Many commercial activities include a preformatted data table. The teacher can remove the data table. In other words, you give students the same laboratory activity, except the data table.

What happens to a group of students accustomed to doing activities complete with data tables, suddenly confronted with an activity lacking a table? Let's assume you told students they would need to record relevant data.

Students might initially be confused. Most likely, some fraction of students would not record anything, despite your instructions. Another group of students would record much more than, perhaps, necessary. They do not know what data are relevant; fearing an error, they record everything. Another group would record the "expected" data, but less clearly than the convenient data table otherwise provided. A fourth group would record the "expected" data and use a data table similar to that which would have been provided.

Finally, a fifth group of students would record relevant data creatively, in a manner that works for them. This last group might, for example, record information in a visually appealing manner that you never would have imagined. Those with other learning styles might create similarly imaginative methods to record their data.

Three major results happen when teachers omit data tables. First, students present a variety of data display methods. Some are easier to understand than others. The situation presents you with an opportunity to discuss and teach students about the communication skills involved in helping others see information at a glance. The chance is there to help students compare data display methods and decide which methods communicate the information most easily and pleasantly. This is a valuable skill.

Second, you won't have to look at dozens of identical lab tables when reading student lab reports. A little variety and creativity in student work makes grading less tedious. Make data presentation count for part of the lab's grade.

Third, students eventually learn to think about the data they should record and how to record it. It may take a few activities sans data table for students to realize they must do these things, but most will catch on.

More Modifications

Teachers can then consider modifying student procedures, without eliminating them. For example, you can modify (or omit) many measurements given within directions. Directions might say to put 20 ml of a solution into a test tube. Why 20 ml? Why not 18? If a student used 26 ml, would the results be different?

Consider what would happen if students were told to put "a few" or "several" ml into the various well plates. Some would put such a small volume of liquid they couldn't see what was happening; they would learn something about why 20 ml may be optimal.

Some students might use considerably more than 20 ml. If given a limited volume of chemicals to work with, they would learn about the need to think ahead and plan, especially if they ran out of reagents and were unable to complete the activity. This latter point is something you might tell students about before beginning the activity.

As with the data table discussion above, the lack of directions may initially confuse some students. However, students do eventually catch on if the teacher perseveres.

Remember: make changes gradually. You may want to leave the data table out for a few activities before starting to modify procedures. You and your students need time to accustom yourselves to new elements of teaching and learning.

 More Radical Changes

Finally, after students are used to the independent thinking that comes from activities without data tables and total step-by-step directions, they (and you) may be ready for occasional activities demanding more thought on their part. You can often distill commercial activities to a single question that students answer when doing the activity. So, rather than be given complete directions, students can simply be given the question they are to investigate. As "hints" you can give students limited materials to work with or even show a sample experimental setup. You are ultimately still in control of the environment in which students work.

Still, they must decide the order to follow when doing their work, quantities of supplies to use, what to record, and how to interpret their data. You may want to try this sort of activity after students understand relevant background information. You may also want to try this first with an easier activity.

I think it is realistic to say that, if you try the changes I am advocating in this article, some students will struggle. However, in this case struggle is good. Students will eventually or immediately rise to the challenge. Higher expectations are good for teachers and students alike. So, try it! You can use materials and activities you have on hand and feel comfortable with, yet still challenge your students in ways that help them think like scientists. Isn't that why we're here?

What about Questioning?

Observation

Counting and Measuring

Comparison

Action (What happens if. . .?)

Prediction

Problem-posing: Can you find a way to. . .?

What happens if. . .? turned around; = prediction

How and Why

Structure-function

Cause-effect

 

 

"I wonder what happens if. . .? When variables can be manipulated; experiments; discover conditions that can change properties.

Non-experimental

 

"I wonder whether. . ." When manipulating variables isn't possible or desirable; nonexperimental, observational; grouping, ordering, describing measuring, comparing properties.

(Adapted from "Helping Children Plan Investigations" in Harlen, W. and Symington, D. Taking the Plunge. Portland, NH: Heinemann Educational Books.)

1. Broad questions: How might the pulse rates of different people compare? What is there about people, or what they do, that might affect their pulse rate? What are some things that might affect a person's pulse rate ?

2. Some variables that might affect heart rate: children or adults of same and different age, weight and height; sitting versus standing position; before and after eating or exercise; different times of day; adults before and after smoking. . .

Others:

3. Narrow questions: Do people of the same age (weight) have the same pulse rate? Does sitting give a different rate than standing? Is your pulse rate the same after eating (exercise)? Is your pulse rate different at different times of day? Is an adult's pulse rate the same before and after smoking?

Others:

4. What variables might be explored for these questions? Give a narrow question for each variable.

How do organisms found in ponds differ from those found in streams?
Do smells/tastes affect our moods and behavior?
What are some differences in the contents of owl pellets?
Under what conditions do pillbugs live best?
(Adapted from "How to Use Closed-Ended and Open-Ended Activities." In ?)

Purpose: To use ourselves as subjects, collecting and analyzing data to generate questions that could lead to further inquiry.

1. Each person in group determine his/her resting pulse rate (beats per minute). Make a data table or chart summarizing this information for the group.

2. Look at the data. What patterns, connections, relationships, questions are suggested? What additional information would be needed to explore or test these?

3. Using the data collected from the group, generate as many questions as possible about variations in heart rate among this group of people. Which could be further explored with the people in this room? Which need to be narrowed?

Other possibilities to explore: Distribution of "handedness" (preference for using one hand or the other), relationship to other manifestations of laterality (preferred foot, eye, direction, etc.)

The Art of Questioning

[This article was originally a talk delivered at the Summer Institute of the College Boards Educational Equality Project, held in Santa Cruz, California, July 9-13, 1986. At the institute more than one hundred high school and college teachers convened to consider how concerns raised by the education reform movement can be translated into improvements in everyday teaching practice. One topic given particularly close attention was that of questioning in the classroom. Dennie Wolfs remarks provided the keynote for these deliberations, and the version of her talk presented here has been expanded slightly to take into account questions raised by institute participants.

The observations that appear in the article come from classrooms Wolf visited while working as a consultant to the College Boards Office of Academic Affairs and as a member of a research project on assessment in the arts currently funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. She especially thanks teachers in Boston, Cambridge, Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, and St. Paul for their generous cooperation. Wolf works with Project Zero, Harvard University Graduate School of Education.]

Ask a teacher how he or she teaches and, chances are, the answer is, "By asking questions." However, if you go on and ask just how he or she uses questions or what sets apart keen, invigorating questioning from perfunctory versions, that same teacher might have a hard time replying. In itself this is no condemnation-there are many occasions when we do magnificently without explicit knowledge: Few of us can explain transformational grammar, but we can form questions, all the same. A major league pitcher is sure of dozens of algorithms for trajectory, though his theory is as much in his elbow as on the tip of his tongue.

Still, a growing body of observation and research suggests that teachers' uncertainly about how they question cannot, or should not, be explained simply as a lack of explicit knowledge. Consider several observations that have emerged from recent educational research:

There are many classrooms in which teachers rarely pose questions above the "read-it-and-repeat-it" level. Questions that demand inferential reasoning, much less hypothesis-formation or the creative transfer of information to new situations, simply do not occur with any frequency (Gall 1970; Mills, Rice, Berliner, and Rousseau 1980).

The questions and answers that do occur often take place in a bland, if not boring or bleak, intellectual landscape, where student answers meet only with responses from teachers at the "uh-huh" level. Even more sobering is the observation that teachers' questions often go nowhere. They may request the definition of a sonnet, the date of Shakespeare's birth, the meaning of the word "varlet"- but, once the reply is given, that is the end of the sequence. Extended stretches of questioning in which the information builds from facts toward insight or complex ideas rarely take place (Goodlad 1984, Sadker and Sadker 1985).

Classroom questions are often disingenuous. Some are rhetorical: "Are we ready to begin now?" Others are mere information checks-a teacher knows the answer and wants to know if students do, too. Missing from many classrooms are what might be considered true questions, either requests for new information that belongs uniquely to the person being questioned or initiations of mutual inquiry (Bly 1986, Cook-Gumperz 1982).

The very way in which teachers ask questions can undermine, rather than build, a shared spirit of investigation. First, teachers tend to monopolize the right to question -rarely do more than procedural questions come from students (Campbell 1986). Second, the question-driven exchanges that occur in classrooms almost uniformly take place between teachers and students, hardly ever shifting so that questions flow between students. Moreover, classroom questioning can be exclusive. It can easily become the private preserve of a few- the bright, the male, the English-speaking (Erickson 1975, Erickson and Schultz 1981, Hall and Sandler 1982).

Questions can embarrass, rather than inquire. They can leave a student feeling exposed and stupid, more willing to skip class than to be humiliated again (Bly 1986).

While this account of classroom questioning is grim, it is also partial. In writing Academic Preparation in the Arts (College Board 1985) and working on a study of assessment in the arts funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, I have spent a number of hours in the back of classrooms. From there I have seen skilled teachers raise questions that ignited discussion, offer a question that promised to simmer over several days, or pursue a line of questioning that led to understanding. Those teachers suggest a counter-portrait of classroom questioning, one that contains detailed clues about how the language of classroom dialogue can be used to establish and sustain not just a momentary discussion but a lasting climate of inquiry. My examples happen to come from arts and humanities classrooms, but I can think of no reason why they should not apply in other subject areas as well -granting, of course, that transferring them may reveal interesting differences among subject areas.

However, before turning to these classroom observations, I want to suggest that the issue of what questions are asked and how they are posed is, or ought to be, part of a much larger inquiry. Currently, there is a deep concern about how -or even if we teach students to think. There is startling evidence that many high school students cannot draw inferences from texts, distinguish the relevant information in mathematics problems, or provide and defend a thesis in an essay. We have apparently developed a system of education in which rote learning occurs early and inquiry late. We teach the skills of scribes and clerks, rather than authors and mathematicians (Reznick 1985, Wolf et al. in press). We have come to accept a view of education that sees the experience of schooling largely in terms of its power to produce employable, rather than intelligent, students and that suffers from basic confusion over the conflicts between pluralism and excellence (Lazerson 1986).

Embedded in this broad concern, however, there is-or ought to be-a second critique-one that points out that the situation of disadvantaged, minority, female, and handicapped students is still more dire (National Coalition of Advocates for Students 1985). For many of them, skills such as analysis, hypothesis testing, discussion, and essay writing may not just be taught late and meagerly-they may be virtually unavailable. Hence, when we examine skilled questioning (or instruction of any kind), it is essential to learn from those teachers who understand how to engage a wide community of learners. As one college teacher put it, "It's not hard to teach philosophy to students who learned the rules of argument and evidence at the dinner table. That's a matter of dotting the i's and crossing the t's. The real issue is whether I can teach students who don't come already knowing."

Independent of whom they teach, skilled teachers question in distinctive ways: they raise a range of questions, they sustain and build arcs of questions, their inquiries are authentic, they inquire with a sense of respect flail decency.

A Range of Questions

Inference Questions. These questions ask students to go beyond the immediately available information (Bruner 1957). 
________________________________________________________________________

Interpretation Questions. If inference questions demand that students fill in missing information, then interpretive questions propose that they understand the consequences of information or ideas. 
_________________________________________________________________________

Transfer Questions. If inference and interpretation questions ask a student to go deeper, transfer questions provoke a kind of breadth of thinking, asking students to take their knowledge to new places. 
__________________________________________________________________________

Questions about Hypotheses. Typically, questions about what can be predicted and tested are thought of as belonging to sciences and other "hard" pursuits. But, in fact, predictive thinking matters in all domains. 

Reflective Questions. When teachers ask reflective questions, they are insisting that students ask themselves: "How do I know I know?"; "What does this leave me not knowing?"; "What things do I assume rather than examine?" Such questions may leave a class silent, because they take mulling over. Nonetheless, they eventually lead to important talk about basic assumptions. 

An Arc of Questions

This arc of questioning allows information to accrue a kind of satisfying depth and complexity. Gradually, the student pieces together an idea of Eckleberg as a watching god- looking out, being raised above, apart, as if in heaven, seeing all. It is almost as if the questions posed form a kind of catwalk of realizable possibilities along which a student can move toward new insights (Luria 1976, Vygotsky 1978, Wertsch, 1978).

The Authenticity of Questions

One important occasion on which students see teachers ask genuine questions is when a teacher tries seriously and persistently to get to the bottom of what a student is after but cannot express or attain. 

Decent Questions

Through their questions teachers have the power to offer opportunities for dialogue to particular groups of students or to withhold opportunities from them. Along these lines, in a 1982 study, Hall and Sandler found that, when compared to their female peers, young males are much more likely to ask questions and to have them answered in a serious way. Minority students' participation in classroom discussion is similarly endangered. We know that sometimes there are culturally organized differences between classroom and home regarding the appropriateness of asking questions, the rules about who can be questioned, or what forms inquiries should take (Boggs 1972, Heath 1983). Yet, when minority students fail to join in classroom inquiry, teachers may interpret their hesitation, not as uncertainty about the rules of communication, but as lack of ability, and may cease to consider them valuable, contributing members of a class (Bremme and Erickson 1977, Erickson 1975, Erickson and Schultz 1981.)

Clearly, teachers can use questions to embarrass or to empower. For instance, questions can be designed to smoke out guilty parties-students who didn't do their homework, who fail to answer quickly enough, or who can't think on their feet. But it is equally possible to use questions to promote students' sense of themselves as knowledgeable and skilled. Thus, even though the student in the following example does not yet know what she thinks, her teacher takes her search quite seriously. In back of his questions is the assumption that the student can come to know.

Questions embarrass or empower: nonverbal performance. The teacher looks at the student when he poses questions; he studies the prints when she does; he respects, rather than cuts off, the student, even when she gropes for an answer; he waits for her to formulate a reply. Studies of just these kinds of subtle phenomena- such as, how long a teacher waits for a reply-indicate that small changes, even in the nonverbal integrity of questioning, can have measurable effects on the quality of classroom inquiry (Tobin 1986).

Then Why So Few Questions?

Why is this the case? Here, ironically, where the vital issue of what fuels or explains these persistent patterns of questioning emerges, there is little or no research. But each time that I have talked with teachers about questioning, they have had explanations. While teachers freely admit they have colleagues who are simply not interested in the work of questioning, they also point out that there are hurdles even for the committed. Here, in their own words, are some things they have pointed out to me.

It takes skill and practice to build a climate of inquiry, and there are few forums in which teachers can be helped in -or rewarded for-this endeavor.
"There are 34 students in the room. Some have read the story, others haven't; some understand, others are lost. It takes skill-lots of skill-to put together a discussion for those 34 people. Frankly, it is often easier for me to take charge."

It is a formidable challenge to establish and maintain a climate of inquiry with students of widely varying backgrounds and skills.
"Questions work fine when you have students who have a set of prior skills-I mean, who know about listening to what someone else says, who can follow up with a question of their own, who are used to digging for information. But what do you do when you don't find that? Do you stop to teach it? And how do you teach it, anyway?"

"My classroom has everything in it: kids whose families have taught them the 'right' thing is to be quiet and respect the teacher, kids who argue for the sake of arguing, girls who take neatly indented notes and never say a word, boys who like hearing themselves talk. How do you make it work for all of them?"

But even with such problems as class size and diversity, teachers rarely cite students as the major obstacle. Instead, they describe the culture of schools as one that dampens their own investment in inquiry.
"Don't forget that teachers live day in and day out in a school culture. That culture teaches. In most places it teaches you to suspect that there is nothing to learn from students. It puts textbooks-not primary sources-in your hands. Textbooks make for the recitation of facts. It's a culture that puts coverage above all. You have to cover all of Biology in twelfth-grade Biology AP English, never mind how your students read. 

So what do these interested teachers want? Concretely, they ask for time and opportunity to think about their classes as moments of joint inquiry-time to observe skilled colleagues in action, time to see themselves on videotape, time to think through not just lesson plans, but process plans: when to ask, who to ask, and above all, how to ask and respond (Kasulis 1986). Teachers want not just to hear about how "prejudicial teacher questioning patterns" are, they want time to grapple with equity and excellence issues head-on, at the level of values and ethics. And, most profoundly, skilled teachers want to be engaged in inquiry themselves. Teachers want to join with scholars to think about curriculum, as occurs in the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute and in the university-school collaborations of the Los Angeles-based Humanitas Academy. They want to have their own skills probed and honed in the way that the Bay Area Writing Program and the Dialogue program in St. Paul do by offering them (not just their students) time to write. Simply put, many teachers want to learn about the skills demanded in questioning and other forms of inquiry-but they want to learn in ways that will sustain their own abilities to inquire and reflect about their own subjects of interest.

Why Question?

First, there is a social outcome-students need the face-to-face skill of raising questions with other people: clarity about what they don't understand and want to know; the willingness to ask; the bravery to ask again. It is as central in chasing down the meaning of a dance, the lessons of the Korean war, or the uses and abuses of nuclear reactors. One could rephrase the Chinese proverb: Ask a man a question and he inquires for a day; teach a man to question and he inquires for life.

And, second, there is a creative or inventive outcome. Being asked and learning to pose strong questions might offer students a deeply held, internal blueprint for inquiry -apart from the prods and supports of questions from without. That blueprint would have many of the qualities that teachers' best questions do: range, arc, authenticity. But if the sum is greater than the parts, there might be an additional quality-call it a capacity for question finding (Getzels and Csikszentmihalyi 1976). Question finding is the ability to go to a poem, a painting, a piece of music-or a document, a mathematical description, a science experiment-and locate a novel direction for investigation. This ability is difficult to teach directly, yet it may be one of the most important byproducts of learning in an educational climate in which the questions asked are varied, worth pursuit, authentic, and humanely posed. Here Gertrude Stein comes to mind. As she lay ill, someone approached and asked, "What is the answer?" and she-so legend has it -had the energy to quip, "What is the question?"

HOW CAN WE TEACH FOR UNDERSTANDING?

We've looked at learning for understanding from the standpoint of the learner. But what does learning for understanding mean from the standpoint of the teacher? What does teaching for understanding involve? While teaching for understanding is not terribly hard, it is not terribly easy, either. Teaching for understanding is not simply another way of teaching, just as manageable as the usual lecture-exercise-test method. It involves genuinely more intricate classroom choreography. To elaborate, here are six priorities for teachers who teach for understanding:

1. Make learning a long-term, thinking-centered process.

From the standpoint of the teacher, the message about performances of understanding boils down to this: Teaching is less about what the teacher does than about what the teacher gets the students to do. The teacher must arrange for the students to think with and about the ideas they are learning for an extended period of time, so that they learn their way around a topic. unless students are thinking with and about the ideas they are learning for a while, they are not likely to build up a flexible repertoire of performances of understanding.

Imagine, if you will, a period of weeks or even months committed to some rich theme--the nature of life, the origin of revolutions, the art of mathematical modeling. Imagine a group of students engaged over time in a variety of understanding performances focused on that topic and a few chosen goals. The students face progressively more subtle but still accessible challenges. At the end there may be some culminating understanding performance such as an essay or an exhibition as in Theodore Sizer's ( 1984) concept of "essential schools." Such a long term, thinking-centered process seems central to building students' understanding.

2. Provide for rich ongoing assessment.

I emphasized earlier that students need criteria, feedback, and opportunities for reflection in order to learn performances of understanding well. Traditionally, assessment comes at the end of a topic and focuses on grading and accountability. These are important functions that need to be honored in many contexts. But they do not serve students' immediate learning needs very well. To learn effectively, students need criteria, feedback, and opportunities for reflection from the beginning of any sequence of instruction (cf. Baron, 1990; Gifford and O'Connor, 1991; Perrone, 1991b).

This means that occasions of assessment should occur throughout the learning process from beginning to end Sometimes they may involve feedback from the teacher, sometimes from peers, sometimes from students' self evaluation. Sometimes the teacher may give criteria, sometimes engage students in defining their own criteria. While there are many reasonable approaches to ongoing assessment, the constant factor is the frequent focus on criteria, feedback, and reflection throughout the learning process.

3. Support learning with powerful representations.

Research shows that how information is represented can influence enormously how well that information supports understanding performances. For instance Richard Mayer (1989) has demonstrated repeatedly that what he terms "conceptual models"--usually in the form of diagrams with accompanying story lines carefully crafted according to several principles--can help students to solve nonroutine problems that ask them to apply new ideas in unexpected ways. 

Many of the conventional representations employed in schooling--for instance, formal dictionary definitions of concepts or formal notational representations as in Ohm's law, I = E/R--in themselves leave students confused or only narrowly informed (Perkins and Unger, in press). The teacher teaching for understanding needs to add more imagistic, intuitive, and evocative representations to support students' understanding performances. Besides supplying powerful representations, teachers can often ask students to construct their own representations, an understanding performance in itself.

4. Pay heed to developmental factors.

The theory devised by the seminal developmental psychologist Jean Piaget averred that children's understanding was limited by the general schemata they had evolved. For instance, children who had not attained "formal operations" would find certain concepts inaccessible--notions of control of variables and formal proof, for example (Inhelder and Piaget, 1958). Many student teachers today still learn this scheme and come to believe that fundamental aspects of reasoning and understanding are lost on children until late adolescence. They are unaware that 30 years of research have forced fundamental revisions in the Piagetian conception. Again and again, studies have shown that, under supportive conditions, children can understand much more than was thought much earlier than was thought.

The "neo-Piagetian" theories of Robbie Case (1985), Kurt Fischer (1980), and others offer a better picture of intellectual development. Understanding complex concepts may often depend on what Case calls a "central conceptual structure," i.e., certain patterns of quantitative organization, narrative structure, and more that cut across disciplines (Case, 1992). The right kind of instruction can help learners to attain these central conceptual structures. More broadly, considerable developmental research shows that complexity is a critical variable. For several reasons, younger children cannot readily understand concepts that involve two or three sources of variation at once, as in concepts such as balance, density, or pressure (Case, 1985, 1992; Fischer, 1980).

The picture of intellectual development emerging today is less constrained, more nuanced, and ultimately more optimistic regarding the prospects of education.

Teachers teaching for understanding do well to bear in mind factors like complexity, but without rigid conceptions of what students can and cannot learn at certain ages.

5. Induct students into the discipline.

Analyses of understanding emphasize that concepts and principles in a discipline are not understood in isolation (Perkins, 1992; Perkins and Simmons, 1988; Schwab, 1978). Grasping what a concept or principle means depends in considerable part on recognizing how it functions within the discipline. And this in turn requires developing a sense of how the discipline works as a system of thought. For example, all disciplines have ways of testing claims and mustering proof--but the way that's done is often quite different from discipline to discipline. In science, experiments can be conducted, but in history evidence must be mined from the historical record. In literature, we look to the text for evidence of an interpretation, but in mathematics we justify a theorem by formal deduction from the givens.

Conventional teaching introduces students to plenty of facts, concepts, and routines from a discipline such as mathematics, English, or history. But it typically does much less to awaken students to the way the discipline works--how one justifies, explains, solves problems, and manages inquiry within the discipline. Yet in just such patterns of thinking lie the performances of understanding that make up what it is to understand those facts, concepts, and routines in a rich and generative way. Accordingly, the teacher teaching for understanding needs to undertake an extended mission of explicit consciousness raising about the structure and logic of the disciplines taught.

6. Teach for transfer.

Research shows that very often students do not carry over facts and principles they acquire in one context into other contexts. They fail to use in science class or at the supermarket the math they learned in math class. They fail to apply the writing skills that they mastered in English on a history essay. Knowledge tends to get glued to the narrow circumstances of initial acquisition. If we want transfer of learning from students--and we certainly do, because we want them to be putting to work in diverse settings the understandings they acquire--we need to teach explicitly for transfer, helping students to make the connections they otherwise might not make, and helping them to cultivate mental habits of connection-making (Brown, 1989; Perkins and Salomon, 1988; Salomon and Perkins, 1989).

Teaching for transfer is an agenda closely allied to teaching for understanding. Indeed, an understanding performance virtually by definition requires a modicum of transfer, because it asks the learner to go beyond the information given, tackling some task of justification, explanation, example-finding or the like that reaches further than anything in the textbook or the lecture. Moreover, many understanding performances transcend the boundaries of the topic, the discipline, or the class room. Teachers teaching for a full and rich understanding need to include understanding performances that reach well beyond the obvious and conventional boundaries of the topic.

Certainly much more can be said about the art and craft of teaching for understanding. However, this may suffice to make the case that plenty can be done. Teachers need not feel paralyzed for lack of means. On the contrary, a plethora of classroom moves suggest themselves in service of building students' understanding. The teacher who makes learning thinking-centered, arranges for rich ongoing assessment, supports learning with powerful representations, pays heed to developmental factors, inducts students into the disciplines taught, and teaches for transfer far and wide has mobilized a powerful armamentum for building students' understanding.

WHAT SHOULD WE TEACH FOR UNDERSTANDING?

Much can be said about how to teach for understanding. But the "how" risks defining a hollow enterprise without dedicated attention to the "what"--what's most worth students' efforts to understand?

What's needed is a connected rather than a disconnected curriculum, a curriculum full of knowledge of the right kind to connect richly to future insights and applications (Perkins, 1986; Perrone, 1991a). The great American philosopher and educator John Dewey (1916) had something like this in mind when he wrote of "generative knowledge." He wanted education to emphasize knowledge with rich ramifications in the lives of learners. Knowledge worth understanding.

TAPPING TEACHERS' WISDOM

Where are ideas for the knowledge in this "connected curriculum" to come from? One rich source is teachers. In some recent meetings and workshops, my colleagues and I have been exploring with teachers some of their ideas about generative knowledge. The question was this: "What new topic could I teach, or what spin could I put on a topic I already teach, to make it genuinely generative? To offer something that connects richly to the subject matter, to youngsters' concerns, to recurring opportunities for insight or application?"

Here is an example:

• What is a living thing? Most of the universe is dead matter, with a few precious enclaves of life. But what is life in its essence? Are viruses alive? What about computer viruses (some argue that they are)? What about crystals? If they are not, why not?

POWERFUL CONCEPTUAL SYSTEMS

It's important not to mix up generative knowledge with what's simply fun or doggedly practical. We might think of the most generative knowledge as a matter of powerful conceptual systems, systems of concepts and examples that yield insight and implications in many circumstances. Look back at the topics listed earlier. Yes, they can be read as particular pieces of subject matter knowledge. But every one also is a powerful conceptual system. Probability and statistics offer a window on chance and trends in the world; the roots of ethnic hatred reveal the dynamics of rivalry and prejudice at any level from neighborhoods to nations; the nature of life becomes a more and more central issue in this era of testtube babies and recombinant DNA engineering; civil disobedience involves a subtle pattern of relations between law, justice, and responsibility; ratio and proportion are fundamental modes of description; the "whose history?" question basically deals with the central human phenomenon of point-of-view.

If much of what we taught highlighted powerful conceptual systems, there is every reason to think that youngsters would retain more, understand more, and use more of what they learned. In summary, teaching for understanding is much more than a matter of method--of engaging students in understanding performances with frequent rich feedback, powerful representations, and so on. Besides method, it is also a matter of content--thoughtful selection of content that proves genuinely generative for students. If we teach within and across subject matters in ways that highlight powerful conceptual systems, we will have a "connected curriculum"--one that equips and empowers learners for the complex and challenging future they face.

WHAT NEEDS TO BE DONE?

At the outset, I called teaching for understanding an apple for education. It's the apple, I've argued, that education needs. The apple of course is the traditional Judeo-Christian symbol of knowledge and understanding. It was Eden's apple that got us into trouble in the first place, and the trouble with apples continues. Our efforts to serve up to students the apple of plain old knowledge seems to be serving them poorly.

What it all comes down to is this. Schools are providing the wrong apple. The apple of knowledge is not the apple that truly nourishes. What we need is the apple of understanding (which of course includes the requisite knowledge).

So what should be done? What does it take to organize education around the apple of understanding rather than the apple of knowledge? What energies must we muster in what direction to move toward a more committed and pervasive pedagogy of understanding?

Although the problem is complex, we have been exploring pathways toward such a pedagogy in collaboration with a number of teachers. An early discovery encouraged our efforts. We found that nearly every teacher could testify to the importance of the goal. Teachers are all too aware that their students often do not understand key concepts in science, periods of history, works of literature, and so on, nearly as well as they might. And most teachers are concerned about teaching for understanding. They strive to explain clearly. They look for opportunities to clarify. From time to time, they pose open-ended tasks such as planning an experiment, interpreting a poem, or critiquing television commercials that call for and build understanding.

Our teacher colleagues also helped us to realize that, in most settings, understanding was only one of many agendas. While concerned about teaching for understanding, most teachers distribute their effort more or less evenly over that and a number of other objectives. Relatedly, the institutions within which teachers work and the tests they prepare their students for often offer little support for the enterprise of teaching for understanding. In other words, as Theodore Sizer and many others have urged in recent years, better education calls for a simplification of agendas and a deepened emphasis on understanding (Sizer, 1984). This in turn demands some restructuring of priorities (as expressed by school boards, parents, and mandated tests) and of schedules and curricula that work against teaching for understanding.

Finally, our teacher colleagues help us see that teaching for understanding in a concerted and committed way calls for a depth of technique that most teachers' initial training and ensuing experiences have not provided. Thinking of instruction in terms of performances of understanding, arranging ongoing assessment, tapping the potential of powerful representations--these have a very limited presence in preservice and in-service teacher development. So a second strand of any effort to make a pedagogy of understanding real must be to help teachers acquire such techniques.

Fortunately, many teachers are already far along the way toward teaching for understanding, without any help from cognitive psychologists or educational researchers. Indeed, some of our most interesting work on teaching for understanding has been with teachers who already do much of what the framework that we are developing advocates. They are pleased to find that the framework validates their work. And they tell us that the framework gives them a more precise language and philosophy. It helps them to deepen their commitment and sharpen the focus of their efforts.

Frankly, we should all be suspicious if the kind of teaching advocated under the banner of teaching for understanding came as a surprise to most teachers. Instead it should look familiar, a bigger and juicier apple: "Yes, that's the kind of teaching I like to do--and sometimes do." Teaching for understanding does not aim at radical burn-the-bridges innovation, just more and better versions of the best we usually see.

Over the past 20 years we have seen numerous reform projects come and go. I would like to share my perception of at least part of the reason for these failures and then apply these insights to our most recent reform effort, the implementation of National Standards.

Learning from the Past

    As I reflect on past projects, I have observed at least three major phases that many teachers go through, or far too often, fail to go through. Phase I might be described by Harry Wong as "Doing what you have been doing, and getting what you have been getting". In other words, Phase I is simply the pre-reform effort phase. Of course, we as educators hope to move teachers to a new vision and this can result in Phase II.

    In Phase II, teachers are presented with a new teaching strategy, usually in the context of an afternoon or one day workshop. So armed with this new skill, but little else, they venture back to their classroom to try implementation or worse, write off the whole experience and tell colleagues seated near them that they already do that. What is immediately noticeable for those who at least think about possible implementation, is how these teachers internalize this new strategy and attempt to move it into practice. Their efforts many times result in an "all or none" approach. Take cooperative learning as an example. Phase I teachers employ traditional classroom presentations and may group for laboratories, but only as a convenience or due to equipment limitations. But Phase II teaching can be just as deadly. These teachers attempt to imbed their new learning into everything they do. So now we see cooperative groups for everything from labs to homework and guess what, it does not work. Phase II teachers quickly reach the conclusion that "this stuff is just another short term educational trend". And of course, based on their "N of 1" data, they quickly revert back to Phase I teaching. Oh yes, I might add that they also become very vocal spokespersons against this new reform and have personal experience to support those views.

    The missing link in the scenario described above requires staying with a reform effort long enough to reach Phase III. Phase III is where teachers reflect on

1. what they were doing that worked, and

2. how they might integrate these new ideas into their pre-workshop repertoire of teaching tools.

    The sad fact is that we far too often fail to invest either the time or the necessary resources to reach and build Phase III teachers. My personal experience suggests that on average it takes anywhere from three to five years for wide spread single component teacher behavior changes to be firmly implemented among a building faculty and from three to eight years with the same general educational reform agenda to accomplish anything close to systemic change.

    Please think about the implications of these statements and their interface with current inservice practice. For example National Science Foundation funding rarely views a project as valuable enough to fund beyond the fourth year and district agendas change with each new administrator or annual plan.

    So it is not enough to be on the right track and be presenting our teachers with solid research based practice. We must be prepared to invest the time and develop better inservice strategies to help teachers transition from Phase II skill oriented practitioners to full fledged Phase III teachers who have not only gained the skill but have reflected upon their own practice long enough to develop true integration.

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