Cultivating Creative, Curious Minds Through Holistic Inquiry - Working With Inquiry Not Against It!

June Evans-Caulfield, Head of Teaching and Learning/ IB Middle Years Programme, Caulfield Grammar School

June Evans-Caulfield is a highly respected educator, IB Workshop Leader and IB Evaluation Team Leader with a proven track record in International and National Educational programs. She is skilled in Workshop Leadership, Curriculum Design and Secondary Education. June is passionate about running effective educational programs and fostering professional growth.

Rethinking Learning Approaches

Let’s not assume that there is one right way to learn or that we need to revert to traditional methods simply because new technologies pose new challenges for educators. If you had the choice of a 1980 model car or a more advanced, modern model, which would you choose? Our approach to education should honor learning that blends traditional and new. Educating the whole child through holistic inquiry is personalized and humanistic in nature and encourages curiosity and creative thought. This approach embraces reflective thinking and helps learners to effectively navigate through life by being able to recognize and utilize their creative problem-solving. It is this that fosters future human ingenuity and innovation by using AI to complement and support our curious, creative and reflective thought processes.

Embracing Inquiry Holistically

Inquiry is holistic. It embraces and nurtures both curiosity and creativity so young learners can think beyond the facts to problem-solve. However, the true secret to effective inquiry lies in knowing how and when to use it to complement explicit teaching. When an educator understands their students’ needs, they can meaningfully integrate holistic inquiry with explicit instruction to build complex higher-order thinking skills.

“When an educator understands their students’ needs, they can meaningfully integrate holistic inquiry with explicit instruction to build complex higher-order thinking skills”

Learning through inquiry is active, empowering and ongoing. Rather than linear, it is cyclical and iterative yet structured. It taps into a young person's curiosity and creativity, inspiring them to view their learning through a conceptual lens. By actively participating in their learning process, learners shift from passive recipients to active, engaging learners, asking questions, exploring issues and solving real-world problems. The educator creates environments for the student to understand the why, how and what of their learning. The learner is provided with opportunities to collaborate, self-manage, self-reflect, investigate and communicate whilst building independence and confidence. Everything is centered holistically around the child, empowered in an interactive, ongoing cycle of inquiry, action and reflection.

The Power of Concept-Based Approaches

Concept-based approaches and inquiry can powerfully complement each other, building connections between and beyond facts, ideas, theories and possibilities with higher cognitive thinking skills. Students can learn facts and information often through traditional teaching methods of direct teaching, rote learning and memorization. Inquiry allows the learner to have opportunities to investigate beyond the learned facts and delve deeper using higher-order thinking and questioning to reach a conceptual understanding. They also will discover connections across disciplines through transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary links to create new understandings that transcend and transfer.

Representations of Inquiry

There are various representations of inquiry cycles often framed as stages or phases within a process. It is at the discretion and choice of the educator how to plan and teach using inquiry, which inquiry model they use and when to use it. Educators who adopt a constructivist approach of inquiry, action and reflection can structure it in authentic ways to allow for fluidity and flexibility for the learner.

For inquiry to be effective, it should be a structured and sustainable approach that incorporates a range of skills and dispositions. The educator can create environments that encourage respect, open-mindedness, collaboration, communication, creativity and critical thinking. Through inquiry and its various representations, the learner can be curious, explore, question, investigate and research. This will assist with solidifying and building their content and conceptual knowledge as well as developing and creating new understandings.

The Inquiry Process

Inquiries can be represented in the form of steps, stages, and phases. Regardless of how it is displayed, it has the commonality of being an ongoing process, with elements that allow the learner to inquire, take action, create, and reflect. Within these elements, there are variations, and the cycle can have multiple entry points. The initial stages or phases should elicit curiosity through questioning and exploring. Both teachers and students can formulate research questions that ignite investigation, leading to an outcome, product or action that can be reflected upon for further improvements. As this is iterative, there is flow and movement between all the parts.

Throughout the inquiry process, the learner also should be guided to think metacognitively about their learning. This awareness helps them interact with the learning and with how they interact with others. There is no single best way to best educate, but utilizing multiple approaches that blend traditional and new is more ideally suited for our learners. The question is not whether to use holistic inquiry but rather depends on when, why and how to use it effectively.

Cognitive