Preliminary inquiry classroom scenarios and guidelines

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This document describes an initial blueprint of how teacher and developers are, in Go-Lab, supported in creating Inquiry learning Spaces (ILSs) and their associated Lesson Plans. ILSs are the Go-Lab learning environments that include an online laboratory and the instructional guidance for students. A Go-Lab Lesson Plan includes an ILS and, in addition, a description of offline (possibly collaborative) activities that can or should be performed with the ILS. So, the Lesson Plan also describes, next to the ILS, the student and teacher offline activities. Lesson plans are based on scenarios. A Go-Lab scenario describes, in a domain independent way, all activities, materials, and interactions for teachers and learners that comprise a complete (online and offline) Go-Lab inquiry learning experience. An example of a scenario is the Jig-saw approach. In this scenario students perform their inquiry in groups of differing composition. Another example is the Critiquing scenario in which students learn by writing a critique on an existing experimental set-up.In this deliverable we start by defining the basic terminology as used in the project and which is also important information for a teacher. In this terminology the concepts “scenario” and “lesson plan” are the key concepts for the current deliverable. Second, the main components of a scenario, the inquiry activities and their sequence, online and offline aspects of this and which activities are performed collaboratively or individually, are described. Third, an initial set of scenarios is given. These are: variations on the basic scenario, the jig-saw approach, changing hats, and learning by critiquing. This set will grow, also on the basis of the concrete lesson plans we will develop and which, if they have a specific new character, can lead to introducing a new scenario. Fourth, a number of concrete lesson plans, examples of how scenarios work out in practice with a specific domain and a real context, is listed. Fifth, we give a first idea of information that can be placed in a default Lesson Plan. The idea is that for each scenario a default lesson plan (so an ILS, but without the online lab, and the related offline activities) is created that can be used by teachers as a starting point for creating their own lesson plan around a chosen online lab. Finally, a proposal is presented on how teachers can learn about scenarios and lesson plans and how they can be supported in creating, adapting, and sharing ILSs and Lesson Plans.