Inquiry-Based Instruction: A Four-Step Process to Student Empowerment

Inquiry-based learning was developed in the 1960s, which involves teaching students the principles of self-directed learning, responsibility for one’s own learning, motivation to learn, personal experience adds to learning. This inquiry-based learning has resulted in a 4-step scaffolding process: teacher structured, teacher guided, teacher assisted, and student applied.

Discusses how to use educational principals to get children to understand inquiry-based learning, and put some of the “burden” of finding the new and exciting knowledge on them, giving them future tools for educating themselves about any given subject.

The 4-step process: teacher structured, teacher guided, teacher assisted, and student applied is a useful tool to help struggling students. In the first step, the lesson is structured and guided by the teacher. In the second step, the lesson is guided but not structured solely by the teacher; students are involved in the process. In the third step, the student is solely responsible for coming to the conclusion of a question posed by the teacher. In the fourth step, the student creates their own approach to a problem or question and guides themselves to a conclusion.

Key Takeaways:

Inquiry-based learning calls for students to be self-directed, responsible for their learning, internally motivated to learn and bring their experiences to the learning process.

Multisensory materials, manipulatives, and embedded memory strategies are all used by experienced teachers as to find what works best for each student.

Teacher assists and the learning specialist writes out the question for the study and the student is responsible for following their procedures and memory strategies to get to the answer in the manner in which they are taught.

Author: Learning Specialist Materials

Author Quote “

However, over the years of working with learners of all ages, I have found that incorporating many of the adult education principles into my one to one sessions with children has been extraordinarily beneficial.

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