Welcome to the Guided Inquiry Online Collaborative Space

Syba Signs welcomes you to this collaborative space, designed to facilitate sharing information about the theory and practice of Guided Inquiry.*

Once you have joined, we hope you will use this space to share sample units of work and helpful resources, and ask (and answer) questions. We hope too that you’ll use it as a place to share ideas about action research that can improve our practice. We will also use this space to support Syba’s ongoing series of professional development seminars by sharing notes, presentations and handouts. Ross Todd and his colleagues at the Centre for International Scholarship in School Librarianship will be joining our discussions.

Background

Syba Signs is an Australian company that designs and supplies educational posters to schools and school libraries around the world. Syba also hosts professional development seminars for teacher-librarians and other school library personnel. One of our seminars, Leading Learning through the School Library, explored how teacher-librarians can use Guided Inquiry to improve student learning outcomes. The seminar, held in Sydney, Australia on 2 March 2007 ,was led by Dr Ross J. Todd, Associate Professor and Director of the Centre for International Scholarship in School Librarianship at Rutgers University. This seminar inspired a great deal of interest and this online initiative is a response to the many teacher librarians who expressed a need to know more.

*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 gradually lead towards independent learning."
http://cissl.scils.rutgers.edu/guided_inquiry/introduction.html