Inquiry-based Learning

I wish I had experienced the inquiry based learning when I was a student.  When I was in high school teachers used the traditional approach where the students sat and absorb the information that was in the content without any interaction, then they were expected to memorize it and write it down in the test sheets. I think this approach has proved it’s inadequate, since the students’ participation is very passive, and the teacher’s role is just a transmitter of the content area. I’m not a teacher yet, however, my goal is to focus on inquiry based learning as a core principle of my classroom. I believe that the teacher and students should be both involved in the teaching process. The students must participate; they need to be engaged in the activities that help them build understanding not only absorbing. They have to answer the questions that they want to answer and be active participants. The teacher must be a facilitator and data and information must be actively used, interpreted, and discussed. Fortunately, I had a chance to observe a teacher who used the inquiry-based learning. It was a science class for the fifth grade and she was asking questions like how can I find how it works? What causes? Then she did experiments and engaged the students to perform the experiments with her.