Guided Inquiry Project

This Guided Inquiry project has been designed for the IB English A Language and Literature course. The project is intended to cover three semesters of the two year long course, focusing on a different Area of Exploration (AoE) each semester. The project runs in parallel with a teacher-led curriculum that also focuses on the same AoE each semester. This way, the teacher-led curriculum conceptually supports the students’ guided inquiry, giving students the opportunity to apply their learning to a subject or work of personal interest.

Throughout the semester, there are designated days for students to work on their guided inquiry (usually once per week), and students are given limited homework to complete in the teacher-led curriculum. On the designated guided inquiry days, the teacher leads workshops and activities that are skill based and collaborative so that students can isolate skills from content, learn new approaches and terminology for new text types, and share their work with their classmates to gain different insights and perspectives.

Assessment

At the end of the semester, students present their inquiry question and findings to the class through a public presentation that other members of the community are invited to attend. The student has ten minutes to present, which is followed by 5 minutes of questioning from a teacher or panel of teachers. The presentation is assessed on an adapted IB English A HL Essay rubric that changes the language in Criterion C to account for the fact that the method of presentation is oral and not written.

(I am unable to share this rubric because it would infringe on the IB’s copyright of their material.)

Rationale for Inquiry

I designed this project to start with an inquiry question because the skills learned and developed through that process are more authentic and interdisciplinary, modeling the process students will follow in the extended essay and university coursework. While this project could easily be adapted to focus on a “global issue” and more explicitly adopt the format of the Individual Oral, I ultimately decided against this. Because the independent inquiry project has students choose passages and texts as a from of evidence (instead of quotes or smaller sections of text), the project does get students thinking about passage work and how passages connect to larger ideas and styles of the work as whole. In the teacher led curriculum, I focus more on the global issues, and students are invited to bring in passages/texts from their independent inquiry to connect with the work studied in class. I use the teacher-led curriculum to more explicitly prepare students for the individual oral.

Further Considerations

This project works brilliantly when students choose a topic/concept to explore and then explore two works or bodies of work in relation to their topic. The comparison allows them to gain authentic insight into the concepts and texts, as well as prepare for the Paper 2 exam. However, this takes a lot of time and places a lot of demand on the students. If teachers finish most of the syllabus requirements in Year 1, this could be an avenue to explore for the Intertextuality AoE in year two, but the teacher-led portion of the curriculum would need to be quite light.