I’m working on exploring new ways of teaching this year. Over the past couple of years, I’ve spent some time exploring inquiry-based learning. I like the idea of it – students having a chance to explore the things in which they are interested (subject to the topics in the curriculum for their grade) rather than having to follow the teacher through things she or he wants to teach (or, sometimes, the things she is just so used to teaching that it’s comfortable and she knows how to share). I want my students to love learning as much as I do. I can’t imagine a time when I won’t be learning something new. I want that same passion for my students.

So last week, I told them that our focus for the term was community (building, learning about, improving) and asked them what they wanted to learn – what they wanted to focus on in each of the subjects.

They couldn’t answer me. (And I waited for a while, like a good questioner should.)

So I thought that maybe they needed a little less pressure, and directed them to talk about it in their groups.

They still couldn’t answer.

I realized that for all our focus on developing lifelong learners, we’ve never really taught them how to become one. Many of them don’t even truly decide how to spend most of their free time. We put them into activities when they are young, and often they just continue these activities as they get older. (The point is not that they are required to do something they don’t enjoy, because they love these activities; the point is merely that they were not often involved in the original decision-making process.)

In school, they have even fewer choices. Much of that is because teachers are quite limited in that there are many things we have to teach at each grade, but much is also because for it is terribly intimidating for teachers to have to be an expert on everything kids might want to learn! (That, incidentally, is one of the things I love the most about inquiry-based learning: the teacher can learn with – and from – the student during the process.)

Yet if I want my students to be lifelong learners, I need to teach them how we go about making decisions about what to learn. I need to teach them how to come up with ideas and how to narrow them down or combine them before I ever get to the point of teaching them how to decide on a question and figure out how to answer it.

In a lot of ways, it’s a daunting task. It means I have to figure out how I do all these things, and then how to adapt it for different learning styles and different students. It means I can’t just teach them how to write and answer inquiry questions, but how to come up with the ideas and topics on which those questions will be based. It’s overwhelming.

And yet it’s so incredibly necessary. Because if my students can learn how to direct their own learning, they can be their own teachers … and I will have the opportunity to learn so much more than I could on my own.