Inquiry Under the Microscope

The most common problem when it comes to introducing inquiry in the science classroom is time constrains. Although there is an abundance of inquiry activities offered to teachers through open science repositories, they have difficulties implementing them, as these activities require more time than they have at their disposal for teaching a given subject. As a result, teachers implement inquiry activities once or twice a year in their school class, but beyond that, many of them continue to teach using more traditional methods in their everyday classes. Instead, giving the opportunity to teachers to work with one phase at a time, along with its constituent components, and introducing them gradually could offer them the opportunity to focus on specific inquiry components each time and thus better understand the requirements of each part of the inquiry.

PLATON introduces the "Inquiry Under Microscope" toolkit, an alternative training method for teachers, which focuses not only on introducing inquiry as a whole but, most importantly, on breaking down inquiry into its components and introducing them to teachers progressively as a series of small adaptations. This methodology will allow teachers to start by rethinking their way of teaching and the way they collaborate with other teachers, and then, continue with making alterations by adding inquiry components gradually, one after the other, into their every day teaching. Moreover, this will enable teachers to progressively shift from a teacher-centred approach to an inquiry learning approach, more smoothly, namely through a series of meaningful and small adaptations that, overall, constitute the foundations needed for implementing inquiry into everyday classroom settings.