As a mother living in Seminole County, I have been paying particular attention to the issue of inquiry-based learning for math. Anyone who has seen the local news lately has witnessed the Seminole County School Board going around and around about this issue. I tend to believe that resistance to this new form of teaching and learning comes down to one thing—people’s feelings about change in general.

I’m certainly not one who accepts change easily. And it seems like I may not be alone. When presented with the new idea for this inquiry-based learning, it appears that many teachers, in addition to parents, administrators and faculty, do not like the idea of being forced to change. If I were a teacher (and believe me, just about everyone in my family has worked in the school system at some point), I probably would be afraid of having to change the way I taught as well. 

And here is where I begin to feel conflicted. Who are we to say what methods are better to teach our kids than others? We know that what has ‘worked’ in the past doesn’t necessarily work today, and we also know that many schools that have experimented with the inquiry-based learning have seen successful results. But there are so many issues that differentiate one school district from another, one individual school from another, one student from another. Will inquiry-based learning be as successful in a D-rated school as it is in a B-rated school? Will students who come from higher socioeconomic backgrounds learn better using this new method than those who come from lower-income families? 

It’s difficult as a mother, with a child who will be entering the public school system in about one year’s time, to be comfortable with the fact that my child may be the guinea pig. 

I don’t have any answers to offer in this blog post. I’m actually mostly just interested in stirring up some conversation. What do you think? Where do you stand on this issue?