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| A teacher leads an online class in Berlin Photo: Britta Pedersen/picture alliance via Getty Images |
Years before the pandemic, planetary scientist Lindy Elkins-Tanton was thinking about the best way to change the world. In conversations with her husband and son,
she kept coming back to one thing: education. More specifically,
teaching people skills that will help them continue to learn even after
school and help make a difference in their own communities. “Every
person has their own miraculous ability to find and solve problems,”
Elkins-Tanton says.
Elkins-Tanton is a professor at Arizona State University and the principal investigator of NASA’s Psyche mission to visit a metal asteroid. She’s also co-founder of Beagle Learning, a startup that has developed an online platform to support inquiry-based learning.
In a nutshell, inquiry-based learning lets students guide
their classes by asking questions and then finding their own answers.
The idea has been around for decades,
but with the pandemic, teachers and schools are trying to figure out
how to bring that method online. In the college-level course she
teaches, students set their own ambitious goal for the semester, or they
set a goal together for the class. (One example goal: “I want to learn
what the universe is made of.”) Each week, they ask questions to get
them closer to that goal and do their own research to find answers. Then
they meet up for a weekly Zoom discussion where they talk about what
they learned with other students and ask new questions to answer the
next week. By the end of the class, they’ve developed their own
“textbook” of information.
That method won’t translate to all other classes. There’s no way to skip fundamental skills like reading or math...
What we did was we asked students, “What was your biggest question from
today’s lecture?” That was a little exercise to take three minutes at
the end of class online. Sometimes you can just do it as homework, you
don’t even have to take class time. Then we would supply the professor
with all the questions. The professor would spend 10 minutes at the
beginning of the next class answering the key questions. And just from
that degree of inquiry and student engagement, his class attendance went
up by 50 percent compared to his previous several years.
