HFS teachers balance traditional instruction with inquiry-based learning experiences. Inquiry-based learning is used as a means for stimulating curiosity, applying new and developing skills to problem-solving scenarios, and generating classroom discussion and initiative.

What does “inquiry-based instruction” mean?

“’The creation of a classroom where students are engaged in essentially open-ended, student centered, hands-on activities.” This definition embraces several different approaches to inquiry-based instruction, including:

Structured inquiry — The teacher provides students with a hands-on problem to investigate, as well as the procedures, and materials, but does not inform them of expected outcomes. Students are to discover relationships between variables or otherwise generalize from data collected.

Guided inquiry—The teacher provides only the materials and problem to investigate. Students devise their own procedure to solve the problem.

Open inquiry—This approach is similar to guided inquiry, with the addition that students also formulate their own problem to investigate.

Open inquiry, in many ways, is analogous to doing science. Science fair activities are often examples of open inquiry.”

From “An Inquiry Primer” by Alan Colburn (http://www3.nsta.org/main/news/pdf/ss0003_42.pdf)