Foundation+ Using Inquiry in the Science Classroom provides teachers who have completed the Foundation training day to focus on the application of P4C within the  STEM Curriculum.

The Course will be presented by Sally Parker and Kate Kennedy White, two practicing classroom teachers with specialised knowledge of the K-12 Science Curriculum K-12. They are both nationally accredited Teacher Trainers in Philosophical Inquiry methodology.

Enriching Science Inquiry by applying and creating hands-on activities and thinking tools.

This is a practical based hands-on workshop where you will observe, participate in and design inquiry tools relevant to and customises to the ‘Science’ aspects of the EY, Kindy and Stage 1, Stages 2-3 and Stages 4-5 of the NSW Science and Technology curriculum.

The process of scientific inquiry will be examined using the community of inquiry coupled with thinking tools such as reason giving, distinction making, questioning, giving examples/counter examples and categorisation.

The outcome of this thinking (i.e. ideas generated) will then be applied to concept exploration such as defining, criteria writing, hypothesising, predicting, inference making, reflecting and further questioning.

Take-Aways:  ready-made classroom activities, tools for embedding enquiry techniques into your Science and Technology lessons, relevant professional reading, lesson planning templates and lesson planning reference tools.

Presenters:  developed and presented by Sally Parker and Kate Kennedy White, classroom teachers with specialised skills in Science and Philosophy.

Completing this course will contribute five hours of QTC registered PD towards providing Proficient Teacher accreditation with the NSW Education Standards Authority.   

Foundation+ Focus on Science will include:

Session 1:  Review and Reflection

Share experiences from the Foundation training. Share any application during practical work. What did you try? What worked and what didn’t? What do you want help with? What do you want to get out of today?

Review the Philosophical Inquiry process and compare to Scientific process.

Session 2:  Expanding on the Tools of Inquiry

Choice of concept games in groups, play game and share experience/ideas with rest of group

  • Empirical questions vs Philosophical questions
  • Good reasons for going into space/not good reasons
  • Correlation/causation
  • Alive/not alive (with props)
  • Disease/not a disease
  • Models/theories/laws
  • Data/knowledge/Information
  • Jobs for machines/jobs not for machines
  • Good/not good applications of DNA technology

Questioning tools:

  • What is a questioning toolkit? Use a question builder and identify consecutive questioning.
  • Do mini science experiments/demos as magic tricks and invite questions
  • Use science cartoons such as energy/slave power
  •  A Master class conducting a Philosophy Science lesson.

Session 3:  Workshop producing concept activities.

  • Provide stimulus
  • Creating concept activities
  • Lesson planning