Wishing

Having practiced an inquiry model I will be better prepared to guide students through the same process. I now know the most challenging parts of inquiry and I can design lessons to target these steps.

After browsing through other students' topics, I think that I should have spent more time watching. There are so many different exciting possibilities! I jumped into my topic because Caddie Woodhouse was on my mind, having just finished rereading Caddie Woodlawn. I liked researching Caddie Woodhouse, but there are more fun and less academic topics that I would have also enjoyed.

I think that wiggling and weaving were the most difficult steps of the process. Synthesizing ideas together to form new knowledge is challenging and sort of scary. It is as though students are creating something new that no one has thought of yet! That's also incredibly exciting! Wow!

I think my experience was very much like a student's experience in a classroom, expect that I was not guided through activities selected by a teacher. I chose the activities from the class guides that I thought would help me with each of the 8Ws. I struggled just like any other student and I also had my little triumphs - like when I finally figured out how to wiggle and weave!

I feel sad and frustrated that I didn't consciously know how to wiggle and weave before now. How could I have gotten through so much schooling without consciously sythesizing? I think that I probably synthesized, but I just didn't know that was what it was called.