by John Turner
Last month, a Binnacle article offered the Severn community a glimpse into the work of the Best Practices Committee, a group of teachers from the Middle and Upper Schools working to both celebrate and enhance teaching and learning at Severn. This month’s article features Inquiry-Based Learning.
Imagine gathering with your fellow sophomores in a science classroom, awaiting your teacher and whatever the class might bring. Actually, you know that the class will bring — you’ll be heading into a unit on the circulatory system after wrapping up the nervous system last week. What’s more, you can pretty much assume what’s to come—a glance at the text, gobs of torturous notes, and the thinly-veiled hint of a pop quiz tomorrow or the next day.
And then learning as you know it is turned on its head: for your teacher comes in the room and begins passing out copies of a strange graph.
