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A podcast for homeschool families brought to you by Sequoia Grove Charter Alliance. Encouragement, tips & tricks, interviews with HSTs and curriculum help.
Rebecca: Welcome to the Sequoia Breeze Podcast, a breath of fresh air for your homeschool. I am your host, Rebecca LaSavio, and I'm so glad that you have chosen to join us today. I get to welcome a special guest, Erika Barrish, who has been an HST with Lakeview for many years. And she is here today to talk with us about something called inquiry based instruction. And I'm excited to have her unpack that with us and tell us how we can use that in our own homeschools. So, Erika, thank you for being here and please introduce yourself.
Erika: Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to be here and talking about this today. As you mentioned, I've been in HST with Lakeview for a few years and I get to start also being a curriculum coordinator now for Sequoia Grove Charter Alliance. So the network of three schools, which I'm very excited about because I get to be a little bit more involved in really delving into the curriculum options available to families more deeply and putting together some training opportunities around those and just learning more about it in general, which I'm really excited about. My teaching credential is in high school history, social studies, and I've also taught math at the high school level and a couple of other subjects in traditional brick and mortar schools. And what's really exciting for me now is that I'm homeschooling my own daughter through Lakeview. She is a first grader this year and she is actually a second generation homeschooler because I was homeschooled through eighth grade back in the 80s and 90s when it was a little bit bootleg out there. So it's really fun for me to come full circle and, and really get back into this community.
Rebecca: That's awesome. And I love how you, your experience sort of bridges public school, homeschool high school, and now with your daughter, some elementary. And so you've got a real nice broad range of experience. That's awesome.
Erika: Thank you. Yeah, it's been, it's been really fun to just learn and grow at every level.
Rebecca: So. But first, before we get into nuts and bolts, tell me how you got interested in this way of teaching and actually using it.
Erika: So in a former position, I was lucky to be involved in the Content Literacy Inquiry Citizenship Project, which is a statewide effort to support educators, usually in traditional brick and mortar schools in California, in implementing the history social science framework. And the framework basically is just a collection of effective teaching practices for social studies in grades K 12. So when I was Part of that work, I learned a lot about designing and implementing engaging history content with an emphasis on inquiry, which is what we're going to talk about today. And during that work, I also learned that inquiry really is cross curricular. It applies very well to a lot of other subjects too.
Rebecca: So which subjects are we primarily going to talk about today?
Erika: Well, I don't know that we need to kind of put ourselves in a box for particular subjects. I, because I'm a history social studies person, that's the lens through which I tend to look at it and approach it. But I have seen really effective inquiry done in Science Killer. I've also seen it done in English Language Arts through like novel studies. And I've also seen it done in math, although my experience with it in math is somewhat limited.
Rebecca: Okay, so let's talk about when you talk about inquiry, what are we inquiring about?
Erika: So inquiry can be boiled down to really being curious about a topic and then using a variety of resources to find information out about that topic. And then this part is really important and it really feeds into the kind of cross curricular piece. It's making a claim related to that topic and defending your claim with reasons and evidence that you've gathered through the inquiry process. They generally, Inquiries generally build off a good open ended question. And if you're thinking about whether a question you're asking is a good inquiry question, a good quick check is whether it can be quickly answered with the phrase, well, it depends. So there's a lot of names for those types of questions. You'll hear them referred to as compelling questions. You might also hear guiding question or essential question. But really the brass tax of it is can it be answered quickly in a way that kind of makes you go, hmm, I need to know more about that. So an example with that would be were the scientific and technological advancements of the Industrial revolution worth the impact to the environment? That's a question that doesn't have one right answer. And it's something that people argue about in the real world actually today. And that's a good other check to run is whether adults sit around and talk about these things and sometimes, you know, argue about these things. But in our context, that means it's a good thing. It's a good inquiry question so that our students can develop the skill of making a claim and defending it with reasons and evidence, which they need to do in a variety of different content areas, but also in real life.
Rebecca: My first question would be, could we sort of rename this perhaps for our Kids like an investigation. Is that essentially what we're out to do?
Erika: Yeah, I think that would be a really fair renaming of it. We really like our jargon in the world. Right. So yeah, I'm all for the simplified synonym. I think investigation is a really great way to think of it. The caveat I would like to place on that though, is that you really need to be intentional if you're designing an inquiry so that you know what your kiddos are going to get out of it. It's not necessarily kind of a free for all investigation, if that makes sense.
Rebecca: Yes. So you need to be prepared to report on it at the end in some way.
Erika: You do, but you also need to, as the parent or the designer of the inquiry, you need to have an idea of where you want your kiddos to end up. I'll tell you the example that I use is when I train adults how to use inquiry. I use one that is based in education around the Bracero program, which is a kind of guest worker program that took place in the United states from the 1940s up through the 1960s. And the first image that I always kind of present to the audience is a number of men standing in line in the desert waiting to cross the border. And invariably when we start to talk about this, and I haven't given them any background information at all, they get very focused on the hats. And so it's really, it's interesting, right, because I mean, that is potentially a direction that I could go with this. But I don't really want them to focus on the hats so much as I want them to start thinking about why are these people standing in line in the desert waiting to cross, you know, what looks like a. Into a facility or, you know, whatever it is. Because that generates, you know, information and curiosity about the topic that is my goal to educate them about.
Rebecca: So using inquiry based instruction is not a free for all. This would differ perhaps from unschooling in that the child doesn't look at the picture and see, I want to know more about those hats. And they decide to go that direction instead. You are guiding this, but they may not fully realize you're guiding it.
Erika: Yes, I think that's a really good description of what's going on there. So it's like a duck swimming, right? That analogy where everything looks cool and calm on the surface, but it's paddling like mad underneath. And that's really true. It does take quite a bit of prep work and effort in order to effectively run an inquiry. But I wouldn't let that, you know, kind of scare you off. If you're thinking about trying this out, my best advice would be to pick something that you as a person already know something about so that you're not trying to learn everything and then suddenly develop these resources and then, you know, teach it through this unconventional way.
Rebecca: So I would not want to run an inquiry about this bracero program that you were mentioning because I'd never heard of it before until you brought it up, but I might about some various topics of World War II, which I've read extensively about.
Erika: Yes, exactly. Exactly. And something that you're excited about that'll make it, you know, easy on you and exciting for your learners. Kids can really pick up on whether we're excited about something or not and.
Rebecca: Whether we know anything about it or not.
Erika: Oh, yes. Oh, yes.
Rebecca: So let's back up a smidge and explain. Why would we want to use this? I mean, you've already said so clearly we are not picking up an open and go curriculum. And it takes some effort from us, both in the setup and in the follow through. Those are both things that can make it a little tough sometimes for a homeschool parent to choose.
Erika: Yeah, definitely. I mean, it makes it tough for a classroom teacher to choose.
Rebecca: Fair enough.
Erika: Yeah. I think the reasons for it is that it's fun and it allows students a certain degree of choice because even though you are designing and guiding the process, there's still returning to this idea of the compelling question. There's still no one right answer. And that can be pretty attractive to students to be honored in their conclusions as long as they're defending it with reasons and evidence, there's really no wrong answer. And that's very attractive for kids. It's also, you can, as you're going through the process, and I'll talk a little bit more about this, you can build choice in at pretty much every stage of the game with inquiry, which is nice, but also it's just, you know, you hook them, they walk away wanting more, which can be really refreshing sometimes.
Rebecca: Instead of more of the topic, more knowledge about what they've been learning about.
Erika: Right, exactly, exactly. They want to know more. Maybe they kind of take it and run with it and do a bigger project project than you had originally thought about or whatever the case may be. But instead of just kind of rote memorization, which inquiry was, was established in a response to as a movement, it's really more engaging for kids to have some ownership in the process.
Rebecca: Sounds like they put an investment into It.
Erika: They do, yeah. And that's where I think the hardest part of inquiry comes in, is that because there's no one right answer. For me, the hardest part of running an inquiry is to validate every student response, no matter what conclusion they draw, as long as they are defending it with reasons and evidence. And that takes a lot of practice. So if you are considering taking this on, just know that it's okay to mess that up and give yourself grace and move forward and just get better at it over time.
Rebecca: At what age is this an appropriate exercise?
Erika: I think the argument could be made that it has a place at every age in varying degrees. So, for example, with my own young daughter, I tend to focus more on the question piece of it instead of the overall inquiry process. So, for example, when we're looking at a work of art, I might ask her what's going on in this picture? And then, you know, she'll tell me what she's thinking and I'll say something like, what do you see that makes you say that? And then she'll have to pick out evidence from the image or the artwork that we're looking at in order to defend her claim. She's in kindergarten, first grade, right. So that is a really good place to start because it gets her kind of into that mode of, you know, thinking critically and things like that. But then the other piece of it is approaching something new and just asking her, what questions do you have about this? And just seeing where that leads the conversation.
Rebecca: When we talked to Andrew Pudwa a year ago, now, maybe I. My question for him was, how do we teach our kids to think? And his answer was, learn to ask yourself good questions. Basically, that's super summed up. What I'm hearing you say is that inquiry based instruction is that it's learning to ask a good question. So you see this. Well, why do you think it is that way? And you have an answer for that? Well, where do you think that came from? And you find an answer to that and you just continue to ask questions until you have enough information to begin to draw a conclusion?
Erika: Well, yes, that's one way to run an inquiry. There's many ways to run an inquiry. Typically, what I do is I start with a brainstorming question phase of it. I use a strategy called question formulation technique, which is from the Right Question Institute, which you can Google, and they have some free resources and all of that.
Rebecca: We'll try it in the show notes.
Erika: Yeah, yeah, yeah. The question formulation technique. And of course, there's many different ways to do this, but essentially, you pose something really interesting. Usually it's a visual prompt, and you ask students to come up with as many questions as they can in, you know, whether it's 30 seconds or a minute or whatever you choose. The critical part of that is that they're not stopping to judge their questions. They're just getting them all out on paper. And then you kind of see, okay, well, what questions did we come up with? And then that allows you to see what some common themes might be. And then again, keeping in the back of your mind what your goal is for the inquiry, helping to guide students to see how different questions might be juicier than others. And then this is one of the elements where you can really allow students to choose if that's right for you, because you can work with students to have them craft the compelling question for the inquiry. You don't have to do that. You can do it yourself. You can do it, you know, in partnership with them. You can let them do it all by themselves. There's a lot of kind of variance there in how you want to run it. But, yes, the first stage of the inquiry is asking the questions and then settling on one compelling question. You're not throwing away the other questions. They may inform the answer to the compelling question. And then you kind of dole out resources one at a time, and you talk about how each resource informs an answer to that compelling question. And then how do those sources or resources work together with each other to paint a broader picture?
Rebecca: How does this process differ or how is it similar to a research project?
Erika: Well, I think in a research project, something that, at least in my. Is sometimes lacking is that compelling question. Sometimes, you know, when we do a research question, it's, you know, tell me about the history of the radio. Well, okay, I can research information about the history of the radio and write it into a report. And there you go. There's your. There's your research project. Whereas in an inquiry, the factual information is very important, but it's not important in a vacuum. It's important because it informs the response to that compelling question.
Rebecca: So it's somewhere wrapping up a research project with like, maybe a debate topic or.
Erika: Yeah.
Rebecca: Does that.
Erika: Yeah, I think so. I think so.
Rebecca: How big of a project is an inquiry based? Like, you're. As you're describing this? I confess I'm. I'm hearing weeks of work, sort of.
Erika: Yeah, you know, it can be, but it does not have to be at all. I get that training for adults done in about an hour, but I would say minimum for kids, you know, a couple days of instruction, you could come up with a pretty decent. To a compelling question. You could make that as long as you like. You could. Especially if it's a really juicy topic. You could make it much, much broader than that. You know this.
Rebecca: So if you were working with an older high schooler and you wanted to ask the question, should we use the results of the experiments that the Nazis performed on the Jews in medical science.
Erika: That's a great, compelling question. Yeah.
Rebecca: That would be something that could span several weeks or a semester.
Erika: Right. I mean, people still argue about that today. Right. In real life as opposed to.
Rebecca: I'm trying to think of a good elementary question.
Erika: I mean that. Yeah, so. So an elementary inquiry question might be something like should fire trucks be red or yellow? Yeah. Or what color should fire trucks be? Because remember, we don't want to necessarily limit.
Rebecca: Okay.
Erika: Student thinking to A or B. We want them to kind of reach this conclusion for themselves after looking at as many angles as possible. So, you know, what color should fire trucks be? Would be a totally appropriate elementary age, young elementary age question.
Rebecca: And that would help them learn, why does fire truck color matter? What's the purpose of it? What do the different colors, what effect do they have in the daytime or the nighttime? Those kinds of things.
Erika: Yeah. And you know, potentially even a little bit of history there. I mean, the old cal fire trucks are mint grain. Right.
Rebecca: They're part of the forestry department.
Erika: Right.
Rebecca: I don't know if that's the reason. That's my guess.
Erika: You know, I honestly don't know either. But I know the old ones are mint green.
Rebecca: I forgot about that.
Erika: Yeah.
Rebecca: I think I've even seen a couple white ones, but yeah, right.
Erika: Like, I mean, we could, we could ask this question ourselves. What that question color for a.
Rebecca: Have a 7 year old boy who is highly aware of all tracks around him.
Erika: Absolutely. You know, no one asks questions like an early elementary age kiddo. They are the best at asking questions. I, you know, I think that that speaks to another point about inquiry that I want to return to, which is, you know, people often limit these types of instructional strategies to older kids because they think younger kids aren't ready for it yet. And my advice would be to just give it a try and see where it lands because you might be surprised what our kiddos are capable of.
Rebecca: We've touched a little bit on various parts of it. But go ahead and walk us through how to run an inquiry and let's hit somewhere in the middle and say it's for a sixth grader. So you can easily ramp it up for a high schooler or make it, you know, bring it down a level for a third grader.
Erika: Yeah, absolutely. So I think, you know, step one is to really figure out what you're going to offer them first, to kind of pique their curiosity and have them brainstorm a bunch of questions about it. Work with them to figure out, okay, what are the questions that are more meaty than others and really kind of drive us in a more interesting direction. And then after that, you, having designed it on the back end, can dole out another resource and really have them revisit this idea of, okay, so now we have more information about our compelling question that we've, we've settled on here. What do we think now? And maybe it's confirming what they believe from round one, and maybe it's, you know, in contrast. And that's an important part of inquiry too, because they may find that they have to change their mind in the face of new information, which is also a real world skill. After that, really, it's kind of various rounds of doling out more and more resources. And for older kids that can handle it, you can start to delegate that. You can ask them to find a new resource on whatever topic you're studying. And at that point you have a really nice opportunity to talk about, okay, well, what makes a good source? Right? Is this credible? Can we really believe that this is true and factual information? And you can talk about credibility and discernment of information and all of those things. And then finally, once you're ready to kind of put it to bed, I think the communication of results piece is really important. So we want students to really come up with the best way to communicate their findings. So that is to make a claim about the compelling question and defend it with reasons and evidence. And that might be an essay, but it might be a poster, it might be a podcast. It might be any number of different ways to communicate their findings with the outside world. Or, you know, even just their home, homeschool portfolio, a slideshow or maybe, yeah, definitely. The sky's the limit there. That's another place where choice really comes into play and gives students more ownership over the process.
Rebecca: It strikes me as something that would work well, family style. Oh, definitely have multiple ages, maybe slightly adjusted with what kind of source or how they're going to present it, or, you know, but you could be, if you chose wisely, you could all be working on the same question.
Erika: Oh, definitely. Yeah, I don't think there should be anything to hold people back from doing it that way. There's a lot to be gained from it because it is so accessible at every age level, especially once kids get in the habit of asking these types of questions and kind of the cycle and the rhythm of it, of finding new information and revisiting their answer and all of that. The other nice thing about doing it family style is it gives you that opportunity for students to work together and maybe debate a little bit on where they're at and they don't have to reach the same conclusion, which I know siblings may appreciate. And so I. I think absolutely, family style is a perfect fit for this.
Rebecca: And let me clarify. I just realized I wasn't sure. Maybe you said it and I missed it. But when you're in the stage of coming up with the question, you. You've started with one source that picture, that subject something, and you coming up with questions about it. Does each student walk away with their own question to answer? Or is the group, if you're doing it with multiple students or at a co op or in a classroom or something, does the group all have the same question?
Erika: Well, that's a really good point. You could do it either way, and there's benefits to either way of doing it. If you have everybody working on the same question, then that leads you in a different direction when you talk as a group about the new information that you're learning. But if kids have come up with their own question and you want to have them, you know, able to pick which angle they want to explore, there's a lot to be said for that, too, because they can still come back to the group and talk about how the work that they are doing on their question informs the bigger picture of the topic as a whole, and everybody can benefit from that.
Rebecca: You outlined what the process is like, so how would I do that on a daily basis? Like, is this something we would spend our entire school day on? Is it something we'd touch on for a few minutes?
Erika: So, I mean, once you get into it, you and your students may find that it's really fun and you want to do it all the time. And I would caution a little bit of restraint here, because you want to keep it fresh, you want to keep it that kind of really cool thing that we get to do instead of another school choreography, which unfortunately, you know, kind of happens sometimes when we overdo stuff. I would say, in general, students could work on their inquiry a few times a week or less, even just to kind of keep it fresh, keep it something that's exciting, that they want to get back to. For older kids, I would limit it to, you know, unless they get like really into it, you don't want to cut them off at that point. But in general, I would limit them to about 40 minutes for younger kids, way less than that, maybe 10 or 15. And then you might want to sprinkle inquiries throughout the year. So not every topic is going to be appropriate for an inquiry. For example, you know, if you want kids to know how photosynthesis works, you might want to just teach photosynthesis instead of running it as an inquiry. So always ask yourself, is this really the best fit for what we're studying next? And then we've talked before about this, but just to reiterate, it is time consuming to gather those quality resources, so you don't want to burn yourself out either.
Rebecca: And when you say work on it, you're talking about reading through some books, talking about it, seeing how that fits into the question that you're trying to answer.
Erika: Yeah, stuff like that. I'm actually less inclined to use books as a whole when I'm doing inquiry. I like to make my selections of text that I use for this much, much shorter so that I can really keep it focused. So rather than having kids, you know, read a book about the Nazi experiments During World War II, I might find a really cool two page article about it and use that instead. And then visual resources are outstanding for inquiry. And kids can get a whole lot out of visual resources. They can also learn to look really closely at things, which sometimes when we're thinking about visual resources, we gloss over it. But the inquiry process forces us to kind of slow down and really look carefully at what's in an image.
Rebecca: This is a very guided process. It doesn't sound like the parent putting something in the hands of kids and walking away. And we'll talk about it tomorrow, right?
Erika: I mean, you could say we'll talk about it tomorrow, but then when you talk about it tomorrow, the student needs to be prepared to answer the compelling question, given what they now know. And that's we'll talk about it tomorrow.
Rebecca: So, for example, here's a two page article. Let's read this today. Okay. How does that inform our answer to the compelling question? And then the next day we might look at a visual resource. How does this inform our answer to the compelling question?
Erika: Yes. And then how do the two pieces work together? Do they reaffirm what the other has, you know, told us? Or are they giving us contrasting views and what do we need to know next? And that what do we need to know next piece can either be you having planned in advance what they need to know next, or for older kids in particular, when we get into releasing responsibility for finding new sources, that's a really good branching off point for it.
Rebecca: Okay. And so then you go through a few different sources, at least the beginning ones that you've chosen, if not all of them, and then they start to put it together in their presentation of the conclusion, whatever that is.
Erika: Yes, yes. And you know, ideally that part is not daunting because you've kind of put your hands all over this topic by this point. So they're not necessarily like faced with a blank page. Right. Which is really intimidating by this point. They should have a really clear idea of the conclusion that they're going to draw. Maybe you use a graphic organizer or two to help them kind of their thoughts and, you know, identify what sources their information came from and things like that, if that's going to be part of your requirement. But when they do their project or whatever, their product is going to be communicating their results, that should almost be the easy part.
Rebecca: Could an inquiry based project be part of a unit study?
Erika: Absolutely.
Rebecca: Okay, does it lends itself to that?
Erika: It does. And then, you know, there's another term that I want to make sure that people are aware of because as you're doing more kind of investigating for how to run an inquiry, you're going to see this term called a text set. Two words, text set. And the text set really is the collection of resources that you have curated for the inquiry. And so when you are doing your prep work, you can run a Google search for Nazi experiments. Text set. And that might make your life a.
Rebecca: Lot easier because somebody else has already done this.
Erika: Right.
Rebecca: Okay. No more inventing the wheel.
Erika: Correct? Correct. Yeah. And you know, I mean, I don't know for sure if resources like teachers pay teachers has any text sets, but I do know that there are, at least in the social studies fields, there are a variety of places online that have them. You could check the National Archives, Library of Congress, places like that, if places.
Rebecca: Like that are going to have text sets. Let's go to a question we sort of skipped over, which is where did this method of instruction come from?
Erika: So I, in preparation, because I didn't actually know what the history of it was, I. I looked it up and it actually goes all the way back to the 1960s. So you could think of this almost as one component of the counterculture movement, if you really wanted to, because it was, it was in response to this kind of rote memorization type of instruction that was really popular up through the 1950s where, you know, you stand next to your desk and you recite the names, dates, places, et cetera. So it was developed in response to that. But it also has its roots in a lot of famous super jargony philosophers that are, you know, well known in the education world. Kind of talking about how when students construct their own knowledge, it tends to stick better and they tend to develop more excitement and ownership over it. It really, it did get its first legs under it. I think at least in the modern era in science. The science content area has evolved quite a bit, you know, just in the last 10 or 15 years with the adoption of next generation science standards and kind of this emphasis on lab science and really, really hands on stuff and things like that. It also is popular in social studies and it's done in math and it's done in language arts. That claims reasons evidence piece actually comes from language arts standards and it's in the writing domain.
Rebecca: This comes from sort of a more public school setting and obviously we're talking about how to utilize it in a homeschool setting. I suspect that it has overlapped with development of some of the homeschool philosophies along the way. Like, like I mentioned unit studies and I, I feel like it's not unschooling, but not utterly incompatible.
Erika: Right? Yeah.
Rebecca: I just think the learning to ask good questions, learning to defend your position, not because, by golly, you're right, but because you have actual information and sources is such a massively huge life skill to make you a well rounded person who has thoughts that are worthy of hearing.
Erika: Yes. Yeah. I mean that really to me is the attractive nature of inquiry based instruction. That and then this idea that it's okay to change your mind. I mean, if you start off in the inquiry thinking one thing, but then you have new information that makes what you originally thought not what you think anymore, then that's okay, that's a good thing.
Rebecca: So it offers the opportunity to not just stand your ground, but to actually allow your, your mind and your understanding to grow.
Erika: Yes, definitely. And then, you know, the dialogue piece, whether it's family style with multiple students or just, you know, you can do this with one student too. And I think that's an important piece to include here. But really if you are doing it with one student, then the learning coach really does need to be very heavily involved in the back and forth of information. Because being able to discuss your learning is super important because that's where the challenges come in. Right? Oh, well, what about this? So did you think about that? What else do you need to know that can be really hard to do on your own, especially as a. As a kiddo? So having that kind of back and forth dialogue with the learning coach is critical if it's one. One kiddo going through.
Rebecca: Can you tell us about a real life inquiry that you ran when you were a classroom teacher and what that process looked like and how the kids came to a conclusion?
Erika: Yeah. You know, it's funny that you brought up World War II. So I was a. I was a high school history teacher and I taught world history. And the one that I did had to do with how the Nazis were able to gain power in Germany. But what I did do was I divided my kiddos up into groups based on their reading level, and I had different sources that they were working on depending on their reading level. But then that wasn't the end of the story because the kids that had the purely visual resource had to then split up and work with the kids who had the purely textual resource and everyone in between and share information. And those small groups had to kind of figure out how each of them shared a piece of the puzzle.
Rebecca: So did each kid come up with their own conclusion or did each group agree, or did the class as a whole have to decide what the answer was?
Erika: Personally, I am reluctant to. Especially in a case like this, I'm reluctant to have the kids required to reach one conclusion because that's kind of the whole point. Right. There's multiple. Right answers. After we did the exploration of the different sources and the kids worked together and kind of saw how their, how their pieces fit, then they went back to their home group and talked about what they had learned from their peers. And then we did a whole group kind of discussion about what we had learned about how the Nazis were able to take power in Germany. Again, it's one of those things that no one really totally agrees on today. I mean, there's, there's certainly sound theories out there, but unless you're living it, it's really hard to say.
Rebecca: That's an interesting way to handle multiple levels though, too. Yes, that some were more visual and some were more textual, but they shared that information.
Erika: Yeah, I, I think that's a really good thing to do. Just in general, when we're talking about instruction is, you know, it's fine that kids are at different reading levels. For example, and they all have a piece of the puzzle and they can all contribute.
Rebecca: So I just want to throw out a couple of examples of other subjects to help get the creative juices flowing for parents that are listening. So, for example, would a good compelling question for English be perhaps? I'm reading To Kill a Mockingbird at the moment, so I'm trying to think of a good one for that.
Erika: Yeah.
Rebecca: What role does education play in the perspective of the various players within To Kill a Mockingbird? That's not quite refined enough, I don't think.
Erika: But yeah, you know, does it have one right answer or are there cases to be made for multiple right answers?
Rebecca: Yes, perhaps it needs to be narrowed down to one or two characters though.
Erika: Possibly, I mean, the other.
Rebecca: Or does education play a role?
Erika: There you go. I mean, I think that's a good one. And you know what is kind of interesting about that is sometimes these questions that start with words like does, did, is whatever, we expect them to have one right answer, but they don't always.
Rebecca: Or maybe it has an answer. But I mean, you said it should be able to be answered with it depends. And I don't know if maybe yes, but is also an appropriate answer.
Erika: Yeah, I think it is. I think, you know, in the, in the example you're bringing up there, you know, posing it in the way you did makes it much more open ended because perhaps education plays a role in certain characters development but not in others. You know, I'll go back to the Industrial Revolution question that I asked earlier, which, you know, is definitely something that people argue over to this day.
Rebecca: And it's both historical and scientific.
Erika: Right. But you have to be able to know, you know, were the scientific and industrial advancements during the Industrial Revolution worth the environmental impact?
Rebecca: That's a really big question to investigate just because there is like, so what were those effects? What impact did they have? What advancements were there? What, which advancements are we even talking about?
Erika: Right.
Rebecca: Well, the question is worth the impact on the environment. But you, I wonder if you could, if you wanted to take it further, you could answer that question. And now with the knowledge you have, let's go on to answer the question. Was it worth the impact to the workers?
Erika: Right, yeah, absolutely.
Rebecca: Yeah. There's a very different question.
Erika: Definitely, definitely. And are we talking about just in that time or are we talking about, you know, carrying through to modern times?
Rebecca: So what does inquiry look like in science?
Erika: So inquiry does look a little bit different in science than it looks in social studies. We have to depart from this idea that a good, compelling question is answerable by the phrase it depends. And look instead at the scientific process. So, generally speaking, the first step in science is to find what is called a phenomenon, which just means something that you can see, something that is. Is observable to the naked eye. A good example that we all just kind of talked about recently, fairly recently, is the northern lights. Right. Because they were visible so far south. So when you identify a phenomenon, you then ask students, what do you wonder about this phenomenon, what could be going on here? And then from there, you enter into the scientific process and ask them to generate a hypothesis about what they observe, and then think about how they could test their hypothesis and then design and implement whatever experiment is required. And then finally you ask them to make a claim and defend it again with reasons and evidence. So that's really what it looks like in science as opposed to social studies.
Rebecca: Okay, so this has all been pretty fascinating, and I have enjoyed trying to get my head around it. But I am curious, are there resources online that families could find or books that could sort of help you walk step through by step through this?
Erika: There are. There's quite a few books for sure about inquiry. The danger with that in our model is that they're not designed for homeschool. So. Okay, just be aware of that when you're, when you're investing in something like a book.
Rebecca: Okay.
Erika: Maybe go to my local library first.
Rebecca: Written to teachers in classroom.
Erika: Okay, yeah, but there's plenty out there online. I mean, when I just did this Google search for good science questions, I came across a website called learningbyinquiry.com.
Rebecca: Oh, okay.
Erika: So I think you can, you can definitely go down the rabbit hole, but at the end of the day, I don't necessarily want people to go down the rabbit hole because it can be very intimidating the further down there you get. Okay, just try. It would be my advice. You know, pick something that you know about and are excited about and just give it a whirl and see what happens and then reflect for yourself. Okay, what worked, what didn't work, what are. What am I going to change for next time? What am I definitely not going to do again, you know, because that's part of it, and then just kind of, kind of see where it goes. And then I would love to. I don't know if we have a mechanism for this, but I would love to hear from homeschool parents, if they try this out, what their experience is.
Rebecca: Well, they could certainly email you, and they can always email me at podcastsquoiagrove.org and I can forward it to you because I love to hear from people on that email. And just sitting here brainstorming. I did have a couple other quick, like, could a good inquiry question be is it worth it to plant oats in our garden or is it worth it to plant to raise our own Thanksgiving turkey?
Erika: Right. Definitely.
Rebecca: So you could get some more like, really practical on the science side, some sort of maybe, you know, if you're a homesteader, some like real down to earth homesteading questions of is it economically feasible to xyz.
Erika: Right. Yeah. No, I think those are marvelous questions. I really do. There's a lot that goes into that you have to think about, you know, feed costs and, you know, consumption. If you're talking about the oats question, how. How many oats does it take to make a bowl of oatmeal? Exactly.
Rebecca: As well as labor and water and.
Erika: Right. Yeah. I don't know about you, but our tomatoes are the most expensive tomatoes I've ever eaten in my life.
Rebecca: So are our eggs. And take a long time to pay off that coop.
Erika: Oh, boy. Yeah.
Rebecca: So there could be some businesses. When we were listing off subjects earlier, you could also kind of go down a business route or a homestead route or some real practical, is it, is it more economical to make my own bread or to buy it?
Erika: Absolutely. And then, you know, I also think, you know, kids are often quite entrepreneurial. So thinking about, okay, well, you want to open a slime store in the case of my daughter, let's really think about, you know, what that would take. And, and is it worth it to open a slime store? We live in the middle of the woods, darling. Like, I'm not sure we have clientele, but, you know, maybe. We'll see.
Rebecca: So what that tells me though is that we all use inquiry in our lives. Many of us do in ways that we're not even thinking of in a particularly an educational sense, or if we are, we're not attaching that word to it, but that we are doing an investigation into. How could this work? What would it take? What do you need to have?
Erika: Absolutely. Yeah. And I, I hope that knowing that makes it more accessible.
Rebecca: Yeah. Because some of those are also like two hour projects. They're not. Or four week units too.
Erika: Right.
Rebecca: So they don't have to be quite as big of a project if you wanted to try it on smaller scales.
Erika: Yes, yes, definitely. I, you know, again, I think the best advice for someone just starting out is to pick something that really excites you that you already know about. That's going to give you the best chance of success with it and the most excitement about then moving forward with it for other things.
Rebecca: Thank you Erika for joining me today. This has been a really interesting conversation and really stretched my thinking a little bit because it's not a way I have particularly approached my homeschool. So again, thank you for being here.
Erika: Thank you so much for having me. It's been really fun talking with you about Inquiry Parents.
Rebecca: I hope that you feel inspired by Erika and the ideas that she shared with us today. I loved her admonition to start with something that you know, something that excites you. That's actually how our clubs come about. HSTs are asked to share something with our students that they know and love. I think it can be tempting at times to try to outsource a lot to other teachers for our kids, but don't forget about all the cool stuff you know. You homeschool to spend time with your students and to share your knowledge with them and learn with them. So take what you've learned today and ask good questions with your kiddos and go investigate. You can do some really cool things together. If you still want help getting started, you can try exploring the curiosity quests created to help your family learn together, investigating some fun topics in creative ways. You can find the details for those in the Sequoia Scoop. Each week they've had some really fun ideas like creating recipes, campaigning for your favorite food or nutrient, and there will be many more to come. Thank you so much for joining Erika and me today on this episode of the Sequoia Breeze. A breath of fresh air for your homeschool. The resources that Erika mentioned are in the show Notes for you to explore. And if you have any questions, I'd always love to hear from podcasts@sequoiagrove.org I've been your host, Rebecca LaSavio. Have fun learning with your kiddos.