•  On Jul, 17, 2022
•  Tutoring Primary
•   Blog

Enquiry Learning Needs Review

Enquiry Learning needs a review. Students need information to manipulate in their minds. While transferring information to students is strongly criticized as an outdated form of teaching, it is nevertheless an essential part of teaching and learning.  Information needs to be presented to students in an orderly, structured and comprehensible way, appropriate to their level of language and intellectual maturity. Up till the age of about ten, a child is in the concrete phase of development.

Students can drink in great amounts of fascinating factual information in the first six or seven years of their formal education. As they mature, students

• manage the information,
• query it,
• move it around,
• discuss it,
• write about it, and
• use it to solve problems.

This phase of learning entails understanding relationships between facts.

The challenge for teachers and schools is to pick the right time to introduce Enquiry Learning that builds on the bedrock of facts in contexts of scientific language in primary school. Terms, methods and even history of discoveries help them with later Enquiry Learning.

The problem needs to be refined. There is a problem introducing this method to primary school children but there appear also to be problems with the way teachers manage Enquiry tasks. Let’s hope it is not too long before these issues are ironed out.