In recent years I have let my students actually do inquiry, not hear me talk about it over over and again. But my dilemma is this--the majority of my students have never designed a lab before, or, if they have, didn't do it often enough in order for the process to stick to their neurons. They are mainly used to the classic cookbook labs, where the steps and result are pre-thought-out for them and where you end up with a whole bunch of wasted time and no true learning taking place (from my experiences with them, anyway--students follow the steps, but are never really thoughtful or mindful about why they are doing any of it. This usually means I have to connect the dots between the results and the science most of the time). They have also been taught that they must never, ever, be wrong. This creates students that fear designing a lab on their own. I find that they either sit in semi-paralysis, afraid of writing something wrong--or they seek confirmation from you after each thing they do, wanting to know if it's right or not.
To try and solve this dilemma, I first set them up for failure while learning inquiry. Here's the basic overall plan:
1) Have students design a lab around a central driving question. For example, my biology classes are trying to determine if antibacterial products and/or antibiotics are good or bad. From that central question, students developed more specific testable questions to help them arrive at the answer to that larger question.
2) Have students design their own hypotheses and lab procedures that answer their testable question, but don't help them design their labs. Put together a huge honkin' pile of materials on a lab table, give them a list of the names of the items in the pile, and then let them have at it. I walk around the room looking at their procedures in their pre-lab forms to make sure they are safe, but I have to restrain myself from correcting their labs and smoothing out the learning bumps ahead of time. This means I don't say much. This is very hard for me (if you know me, you know how hard!); I was sure this year I might have to duct tape my mouth shut as I wandered around the room. Old teaching habits die hard.
3) Seriously, DON'T help them design their labs--in any way, shape or form. They will ask you questions like this:
"Do you want us to graph the zone of inhibition or the amount of growth of the bacteria?"
And you CANNOT answer them. Well, you can answer them with a "Graph what you decided as your dependent variable in your pre-lab" or a "What did you measure in your lab? That's what you need to graph" or even a "What do you think you should graph to find the patterns and trends in your data?" but you cannot give them the answer. Because then they have learned they can ask you to do their thinking for them. As hard as it is for us teachers to watch sometimes, we have to learn to let students make decisions on their own--even if it's the wrong one, and we teach them how to cope with their wrongness.
4) Let them carry out their lab, even if you know it's going to crash and burn when they try to measure their results. When my biology-ers were setting up their labs, they were streaking the lids of the petri dishes rather than they agar (after being shown how to streak a plate and how to prevent their dishes from becoming contaminated), they were dumping loads of antibacterial products directly on their agar, they were taking the lids off completely for extended periods of time, they had experiments with no controls, and controls with no experiments. It was hard for me to watch, because my inner teacher self kept wanting to rush in and save their experiments from impending doom because, frankly, they were all microbiological messes. But I just averted my eyes from the mess, repeated my inner mantra of "Bad teacher DON'T fix it" over and over again, and kept my eyes out for flagrant safety violations instead.
5) Bust out examples of experiments--good and bad--in order to help them see their own mistakes. And then have them fix those mistakes in their lab design. I normally do this through the discussion of my daily journal questions, but I have also give students good and bad examples of lab reports and asked them to score them. I usually give the bad one first, because they will score this one pretty high....until they see the good one. Then the great discussions begin about what makes a quality lab write-up. After those discussions, students revisit their pre-lab and revise their hypotheses and procedures. Some of the best discussions I've ever seen, however, have revolved around actual pictures taken of student experiments (both good and bad). I usually take pictures of their experiments (such as the one below) and then throw those on their daily journals with some pertinent questions to what I saw going wrong or right in the lab the day before.
6) Have students do their freshly-revised lab. Oh, and don't help them revise or do the lab this time, either. Turn the "safety-only" filter on inside your science teacher eyeballs!
7) Repeat step #5 if needed. I had students do their labs three times, and I let them make any adjustments they felt they needed to make after lab revision time. If it meant scrapping an entire lab procedure and starting new, I let them. If it meant making only minor adjustments, so be it. It's more about the process, not the "rightness."
The steps above apply to designing their procedures only; I am also applying the same steps when students write their data analyses. This week they are going to write and rewrite, looking at examples but also doing activities regarding basic science concepts so they can take that science and use it to explain their data. "Explaining their data using science" may sound simple to you and I, but it is a huge mental hurdle for my students who are used to ferreting out right answers out of a text just long enough to take a test that assesses nothing true or real about learning. It takes practice, and it takes more than a week--it takes years, in my opinion, to truly master that application and synthesis skill at its highest level. I am lucky enough to start my students off at the beginning of that thinking journey. And, in order for them to internalize this process, we're starting most units with this process of inquiry, either to design a lab or to solve a problem PBL-style.
Obviously, this takes time. (I'm slow, remember?) But I think it's time better spent than what I used to do--prepping my students for a one-day lab experience, worrying and fretting that they would do something to screw it up, doing way too much telling instead of having students doing just so they would avoid making mistakes. Now I give them time to screw up, and to learn from mistakes. I had to build in time for failure, and I don't regret a single nanosecond.