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| Engaging Readers & Writers with Inquiry (Theory and Practice)
Paperback
Author: Jeffrey Wilhelm
Publisher: Scholastic Teaching Resources (Teaching
Release Date: 2007-02-01
ISBN-10: 0439574137
ISBN-13: 9780439574136
List Price: $21.99
Average Customer Rating:
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What makes a good relationship? How does flight influence behavior for humans and birds? Is it ever permissible to lie? Reframing our units and lessons with questions such as these makes learning more exciting for students. Wilhelm debunks the myth that teaching through inquiry is hard. He shares practical, easy ideas for turning state standards into engaging authentic questions that propel students toward deep understandings. Includes sample lessons, discussion techniques, and questioning schemes for all the content areas. For use with Grades 4 & Up.
An engaging read!
| Customer Rating: | This book is a must for any teacher seeking to enliven their classrooms in a time where students are increasingly thinking, questioning and showing interest in the issues that affect their lives and the world around them.
This book not only offers a myriad of practical examples of the inquiry process and how you can frame current ideas, concepts and understandings as inquiry; but it also provides the teacher with the intellectual rigor and confidence to create one's own inquiry based units - from front loading, to the scaffolding of learning through to culminating projects. This book encourages you to think, question and explore your own teaching practices, through references to the theory behind these ideas, and in doing so this text honors and respects the knowledge and ideas that you as a teacher already bring to the classroom. What it encourages teachers to do is to use instructional methods that will assist students in making connections, will allow them to present their voice and perspective on an issue and lead to the deeper understandings that will be long lasting and more meaningful and relevant for our students. It provides processes and strategies that mirror the learning that occurs in `the real world.' After all, is this not what we want of our students - to become life-long learners?
Too many times, I have read books that claim to provide all of the answers. Such books present the so called `perfect lesson' along with a step by step guide of how to achieve this. I find these types of books to be both condescending and unrealistic. As all good teachers know, this is not how it works in real life. What gives Wilhelm so much credibility is the fact that he has taught through inquiry, he has used and adapted many of the ideas that he presents and he talks about what has worked for him in an honest and open fashion. One must build onto the ideas presented by others, apply and synthesize in a way that suits their own style of teaching and adapt to suit the needs of their learners. This book helps you as a teacher to fit all of the pieces to the puzzle together. Never dull, nor vague, Wilhelm provides us with a smart read and lays out the challenge ahead for us as educators.
As a teacher for nine years who has had much success with inquiry based learning, I only wish that I had such a book when I first began teaching.
Once again, a must read for all teachers. I thoroughly recommend Engaging Readers and Writers with Inquiry. Every teacher should have a copy.
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Very Frustrating
| Customer Rating:  | | I have read many of Wilhelm's books and have heard him speak. He is full of positive energy and passion for his vocation. I have found the same problem, however, with all of his books: vagueness.I have read and re-read this book, the first edition of You've Got to Be the Book and Getting it Right looking for something I missed. Yes, he gives some examples, but never follows a lesson to completion. What is offered are highlights. Maybe I am supposed to connect the dots, but this book is especially uneven. I felt like I had to slog through the many pages theory only to find there was not a big payoff. He alludes to techniques like secret prompts and walkarounds, but none are carefully detailed. I have been teaching language arts for twelve years, but I felt like I still didn't have the correct vocabulary front loaded to use these techniques. He provides a skeleton, but does not flesh out what inquiry really looks like in a classroom. Unfortunately, I was frustrated and unable to put much of this information into practice. It's kind of like when a colleague shares handouts from a terrific conference you didn't attend. It looks good and you want to use it , but ultimately you cannot because you just weren't there. |
Remember When Learning Was Fun?
| Customer Rating: | When we were kids -- and this is true of both all teachers and all students -- we actually WANTED to learn. We asked questions galore. We were curious about things that interested us, and we were relentless in putting together the pieces or engaging the experts (Mom, Coach, the camp windsurfing counselor) necessary to get our answers. So, what happened to all that enthusiasm once the kid moved on to the classroom? Jeffrey Wilhelm (and the vast body of research he cites) has some answers in his new must-read-if-you're-a-teacher book, ENGAGING READERS & WRITERS WITH INQUIRY.
Wilhelm's book is, hands down, one of the "meatiest" resources I've read. The initial chapters go over definitions and research to give you a foundation in inquiry's history and latest manifestations, but after that it is one practical strategy after another, each rich with examples from Wilhelm's own classes.
The heart of the inquiry method is questioning. Wilhelm teaches us to build "inquiry units" by creating "guiding questions" that students are actually curious about and want to answer during the unit. He also shows how these open-ended questions should be constructed (tips and pitfalls are included) so that they relate not only to your educational goals, but to the kids' lives and our shared world. Here we are putting the "fascinated kid" back into the "formerly bored student." Once you have the question(s), you move to designing the final product(s), followed by the creation of all of those formative tasks (from simpler to more complex) used to get to that final product (this is known in educational circles as "backwards planning").
As you get into the heart of the book, Wilhelm offers an array of strategies, including secret prompts; walkarounds; entrance and exit tickets; and before, during, and after questions. He gets into questioning schemes that take students up the ladder of complexity. Some of the schemes involve mentoring the students so that THEY ultimately create schematic questions for each other. So if you think you really learn something by preparing materials to teach it, consider the benefits in teaching your KIDS to do this for each other, thanks to your modelling and mentoring.
Among the questioning schemes Wilhelm covers are "The Questioning Circle," "ReQuest," and "QARs, or Question-Answer Relationships." Then he focuses on author-reader transactions by sharing two authorial reading strategies utilizing inquiry, one called "QtA, or Questioning the Author," and the other called "Hillock's Questioning Hierarchy," which is George Hillock's ladder of increasing complexity. Hillock's Questioning Hieraarchy does for reading what Bloom's Taxonomy does for education as a whole. If you're tearing your hair out trying to get kids to grow more adept at literary analysis, you've hit paydirt at last.
In the final chapter, Wilhelm demonstrates how all of these inquiry-based strategies can be used across the disciplines. He provides examples from math, science, and social studies, proving that inquiry's applications go way beyond the province of language arts. He also makes a point of providing examples from Grades 4 all the way up to high school. All of this work can be customized to fit the age-group you teach.
Bottom line: This is a great book for a community of teachers to read and discuss. I plan on buying copies for two of my fellow teachers (same discipline), so we can roll up our sleeves and go to work on making our units inquiry-based. I'm convinced it will show results and know that, once I've migrated to this method, my students will not only be happier, they'll be smarter and more enthusiastic. In fact, they'll be a lot like that little kid they once were -- the one who not only paid attention to stuff, she kept asking, "Why?" until she was fully satisfied.
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Wonderful!
| Customer Rating: | | Another great book by Jeff Wilhelm. A comprehensive book that outlines how teachers can easily engage students with guided questions using inquiry. Very practical resource that will move students from surface knowledge to meaningful and relevant understanding. Will work in all content areas. |
Engaging Readers & Writers with Inquiry
| Customer Rating: | | I am astonished by what I am learning reading this book. Being a teacher, I now have many more pathways to engage my students and help them comprehend the information they will sorely need to succeed in their future. |
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