An Illustration of How Inquiry Learning (Doesn't) Work

Let's start with a definition - According to Wikipedia, "Inquiry-based learning is a form of active learning that starts by posing questions, problems or scenarios."  Ten years ago, you could not attend a conference without being told it was the future of education and would help our students learn more deeply.  Having experienced an inquiry-based calculus class, I knew this wasn't true, but as a teacher of lab sciences, I am expected to think of inquiry as the end-all-be-all of instructional methods by people who have never experienced teaching that way.  Every lab experience my students have requires a lot of direct instruction both before and after the lab experience.  Otherwise, they just observe phenomena (which people had been doing for millennia before the scientific method); they do not learn from them.  Here's a recent personal example.

In December, my students review the learning of the semester with a song.  I like to give them the lyrics in the form of a booklet, but I don't really know how to make a booklet on the copy machine.  There are people in our school who make programs for events, so I had asked a few times in prior years for someone to teach me.  Kind folk that they are, they would just do it for me.  While I appreciated it, I wanted to know how.

This December, on the day I wanted to make them, the person who knows how to do it had not arrived at the building yet.  I decided I would try to figure it out myself.  For forty minutes, I tried things that proved unsuccessful.  I googled how to make booklets, but the initial results used programs and copy machines that didn't match mine.  At one point, I thought I had found it, but when I looked at my computer, I didn't have the buttons shown in the instructions.  I finally realized it was in Adobe Reader while I was in Preview (not quite the same thing).  When I got into there, I found the right buttons, but the printed result was missing two pages and, for reasons I still cannot explain, ended on the 3rd page of the original.  I kept trying things and changing settings until it finally came out right and made the 81 copies I needed.

For supporters of Inquiry Learning, you are saying, "See - you were motivated, active in your learning, used your tools, and you will remember it longer than if someone had just told you how to do it."  Here's the thing, though.  I don't.  Someone asked me last week how to make a booklet, and I could not tell them.  Here are some issues with my experience:

1. Wasted time - It would have taken someone about five minutes to explicitly teach me how to do it.  I spent over an hour "figuring it out."  My motivation was waning and would not have lasted much longer.
2. Wasted resources - The amount of paper and ink that went in the trash can during my failed attempts would make Greta Thunberg cry.  Once, it printed on 11 x 17 paper, and I don't know why.  Since the original document is 9 pages long, each failed attempt wasted that much.  By the way, had this been chemistry rather than paperwork, misuse of those resources could have also been dangerous.
3. Wasted energy - By the time I finished, I had used a lot of motivational energy.  What might I have done instead?  We'll never know.
4. No permanence - As I said earlier, this did not result in deep learning.  It did not result in permanent learning.  I still don't know how to do it.  The reason is that I never engaged in the sequence from beginning to end while I was "figuring it out."  If I tried to do it now, I might stumble my way into it again or recognize some of the buttons when I saw them again, but I would have no confidence in doing so.  Had someone walked me through it step by step, and then I did it with their feedback, I might know how to do it today.

Students need guidance in learning and the more important and/or complex the skill, the more they need us.  As novice learners, they have only surface-level questions about their observations while we want them to learn the internal structure.  Google can give them information; it cannot give them insight (and I haven't even addressed that many sources they find are unreliable).  Students need our expertise to teach them explicitly or create activities that guide them through the learning process.  They do not have the ability to do it on their own, and they certainly would not achieve the standards we have in our curriculum.  Even if inquiry learning could teach all of those things, it would be inefficient and wasteful.  

Teach your students.  Don't assume they'll learn calculus without help.