I first encountered Inquiry-based Learning and teaching as
a beginning graduate students in the physics department
at the University of Washington. As an undergrad, I had been
a physics major in a very traditional program where I sat in
lectures and did my best afterwards to read through the book
and my notes and figure it all out. But at the UW,
I was a TA. The students meet once a week and go through
some more interactive materials, where they are asked questions
and they discuss their ideas together. And the TAs are asked
to facilitate that. And each week, on Mondays, we would all meet
together, all the TAs and the faculty members from the Physics
Education Group, to prepare. And the TAs, us, we would
go through the materials as if we were students. And I quickly
realized that I didn't understand all of the physics topics that I
felt I should have understood or had been covered in my
undergraduate physics major. So these were all familiar
topics, Newton's Third Law, the Work-Energy Theorem,
things I had studied and thought, "Well, I understand that,
that's basic stuff." But the materials would ask questions,
and we TAs would have to work out the answers for ourselves,
we'd question each other, you'd have to take risks.
You would answer questions and not be sure if you were
right or not, but the other students would correct you or
give you feedback or build on your ideas, and, as a group,
you would progress through and make sense of it.
And this was new to me and a complete revelation about
what it means to understand and to learn physics.
So, for me, it not only improved my understanding of these
basic topics immensely, but really caused me to rethink
what it means to learn and understand.
As a graduate student at UW, I had started out in a traditional
area of physics research, Experimental Physics research.
But after encountering this new way of learning and teaching,
I just fell in love with it, and knew that's what I wanted to do.
So, I actually switched my research focus and earned my PhD
for studying the learning and teaching of physics with the
Physics Education Group, which is led by Professor Lillian McDermott
at UW. And so, after that first experience, I just never went back.
After my PhD, ending up here at Western, my first year
or two of teaching, as I think is probably the case for many
new teachers, I was just trying to survive and get through,
so I didn't do a whole lot of inquiry-based teaching in my courses.
I did a lot of traditional lecturing. Then, as I got more comfortable
in the classroom, started to come back to this other way of doing it
and incorporating more student-centered activities and
opportunities for students to make sense of the ideas.
So, gradually over the next phase of my teaching career,
I started talking less and tried to get the students talking more.
And that kind of led to the project in the labs, where, as
a department, we made a commitment to changing the labs
here at Western in our introductory physics course
to be more student-centered and give students the
opportunities to make sense of ideas for themselves.
To ask questions of each other, to develop answers together,
rather than being told by the instructor. So now, here at Western,
every student who goes through our introductory physics
program, has that experience in the labs, where they are asked
to figure things out collaboratively, and the instructor
is a guide and a facilitator rather than the source of the knowledge.
So, our introductory physics program here at Western is,
it's a large-enrollment program. We have several hundreds
of students at any given time in the course. There's multiple
lecture sections. Since all the students in the different lecture
sections take the same laboratory part of the course, they
all share this experience of learning physics as a process
of inquiry. So, there's a well-established syllabus and it's got a
pretty lengthy list of topics. Turning students loose to explore
force in motion on their own, to figure out what questions they're
interested in, to design experiments from scratch to answer those,
while exciting, is not practical in a situation where there
isn't an established syllabus and a fairly long list of topics
that students need to be exposed to.
We decided, rather than open-ended inquiry, to have
a guided approach. So, we kind of established the scope
of inquiry, we framed things for students by asking questions,
giving students specific physical systems to think about
and apply the concepts to. We sort of established a pathway
using guided questions and experiments that leads to where
we would like the students to end up in terms of being able
to understand and apply the important concepts, the ones
they need to understand in order to go on to the next part of the course.
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