At Our Lady of the Way we have developed our own authentic Inquiry based learning program which can be a student centred or an active learning approach that takes, as its starting point, the natural process of inquiry, building on this to develop information processing and problem-solving skills.
The focus is on how we know rather than what we know, with students actively involved in the construction of their own knowledge. During our Inquiry lessons, there is a shift away from a content driven approach towards one that provides children with the skills and resources to discover knowledge for themselves. Children are posed a question and given the skills and resources to explore, investigate and search for answers. They plan and carry out their research, come to some conclusions and decide how they could make change happen. They convert information and data into useful knowledge. Ultimately, the importance of inquiry learning is that students become lifelong 21st Century learners.
The Victorian Curriculum is used to facilitate the planning and evaluation of a sequential Foundation to Level 6 Inquiry program incorporating Science, The Humanities and The Technologies. We focus our big ideas each term on Local and Global Communities, Self and Wellbeing, Exploring the Scientific World and Exploring the Natural World.