Getting Personal with Inquiry Learning in the Early Years (Kath Murdoch)

Description

We are excited to announce that Kath Murdoch will present this workshop for AISWA Early Childhood. Participants will receive a copy of Kath's soon-to-be-released publication that focuses on personal inquiry.  
 
Audience: K-2

There has been growing interest in ‘personalised learning’ for many years now. Increasingly, schools are making arrangements to provide more opportunities for learners to learn to be self-directed and to have their needs and interests met through the curriculum.  An inquiry-based approach is in itself, an approach that recognises the importance of learner voice and choice and of linking new learning to the existing knowledge, experiences and interests of the child.  In this sense, inquiry has always been an approach that nurtured agency, but this can be amplified when children can pursue the questions, interests, problems, and wonders that matter to them.

Teachers who use an inquiry-based approach are committed to helping learners ‘learn to learn’ and to equipping them with the skills and dispositions to more independently investigate questions, problems, issues and interests. But what opportunities do we give learners to do this beyond the “units of inquiry” we may develop?   How can we provide children with real opportunities to explore the things they are curious about?  And why is this so important?  
 

This workshop is all about bringing an inquiry-based lens to our work with children and, in particular, building out capacity to use their interests and questions to inform our planning and teaching. With an emphasis on the role of materials, play and responding to authentic opportunities for exploration, Kath will share ways in which discovery workshops and open-ended play experiences offer rich opportunities for inquiry and connections across the curriculum. 

We will explore the following questions with practical tasks and lots of recent examples from classrooms:

• Why is personal inquiry important? What’s our purpose?
• What is the role of shared inquiries that might be more teacher-initiated? 
• What is the teacher’s role in supporting children’s personal investigations? 
• How can we help children identify their interests? How can we inspire wonderment and curiosity?
• How can play provide opportunities for personal inquiry? 
• How can we use materials to provoke and extend thinking about key concepts? 
• What skills and dispositions help support children as they inquire? 
• How can we make this manageable? What systems and routines and classroom set ups make it work?
• How can we involve the wider community and communicate the importance of this practice to parents?