Abstract:

Guided Inquiry is "carefully planned, closely supervised targeted intervention of an instructional team of school librarians and teachers to guide students through curriculum based inquiry units that build deep knowledge and deep understanding of a curriculum topic, and gradually lead towards independent learning," http://cissl.scils.rutgers.edu/guided_inquiry/introduction.html

It is an emerging pedagogy, developed by Dr. Ross J. Todd and Professor Carol Kuhltau of Rutgers University. In essence it involves teams and teachers and teacher librarians:
- sharing the work of guiding inquiry
- planning and scaffolding research tasks, using the Information Search Process
- seeking feedback from students at critical points
- carrying out planned and unplanned interventions on an individual and group basis, and
- taking responsibility for the successful achievement of information literacy outcomes

Guided Inquiry relies on communication with and between students. Wiki is the perfect tool for this. A wiki is an easy to use website that can be edited by as many people as the wiki manager allows access. It allows collaborative building and sharing of knowledge, as well as providing an excellent group feedback mechanism.

Lee FitzGerald's presentation will focus on:

- an introduction to Guided Inquiry theory, as presented by Dr. Ross J. Todd
- demonstration of Guided Inquiry using wiki, in three ways:

1. as the vehicle for an inter-school research project carried out by 12 schools in the NSW Association of Independent Schools to investigate the learning journeys of students experiencing Guided Inquiry units of work in 2008, which was supervised by Dr. Todd. This wiki was also the vehicle by which Dr. Todd presented the findings from this research, focusing on how the structure of Guided Inquiry, and particularly the Information Search Process, assists in the development of deep knowledge in students. This project was also able to report very similar findings from all involved schools relating to difficulties encountered by students when doing research.

2. as the vehicle by which open-ended inquiries have been carried out by students at Loreto Kirribilli, using actual wikis students have used when doing Guided Inquiries over the last three years, in the area of Ancient and Modern History. Loreto Kirribilli is an Independent Catholic day school in Sydney, Australia, with an enrolment of approximately 1040 girls from Kindergarten to Year 12.

3. as a working tool for staff and students doing any school assignment which requires peer, self and teacher formative assessment. Actual wikis will be demonstrated here from the areas of Music, Religious Education and English.

Guided Inquiry is becoming very well known around the world as a way to scaffold student research tasks which allow transformation of information, rather than the much more common transport of information so often encountered in school assignments. This can take place with the work of teachers and teacher librarians scaffolding students in their inquiry at all stages of the Information Search Process, seeking feedback from students at critical points in this process, and developing structured interventions without which students would find it very difficult to proceed with their research. The essential feedback element can be very easily done using wikis.

Keywords:

Guided inquiry, deep knowledge, wiki.