Inquiry-Based Learning & Historical Thinking

Part of the challenge of being a middle-aged graduate education student is that I was taught in a typical American classroom style for my entire educational career. The teacher was the fountain of all knowledge who stood in front of the classroom and dispensed wisdom and knowledge to the students. I learned what I was told and properly regurgitated it back to the teacher in the form of quizzes, tests, papers and projects. The concepts of Inquiry-Based Learning and Historical Thinking were probably in their infancy (if even that) when I graduated from my first masters program at Fairfield in 1985. In 2007, I am experiencing an entirely new classroom setting, and from what I hear from my fellow students who are already educators, the classroom and how teachers and students interact has changed dramatically. Teachers are no longer all-knowing and value is placed on the students contributing to the classroom discussion and creation and transfer of knowledge. Memorization and mastery of facts, figures and dates is no longer the ultimate goal for most teachers. Their new goal is to provide the student with the tools he/she needs to research and find their own answers, generate their own understanding, and view the world not through the narrow view of specific bits of information but to interrelate that information to create new knowledge. This new type of classroom has been an eye-opening experience for me and there are times I wish I could go back to high school and college and do it all again with this new generation of educators. I hope to be one of them.