Inquiry Units

      As I’m sure you’ve all heard by now, I do a lot of work with UGA service learning through the department of Marine Sciences. I fell so hard for this program, I even went on to complete undergraduate research in oceanography and the general population’s awareness of ocean literacy principles. In this department, there is a huge focus on inquiry based learning. My supervising (read: incredibly gifted and amazing) professor was Mrs. Catherine Teare-Ketter; an intelligent woman who is fully capable of anything, and knows it. She helped mold me into the critical thinking student that I am today. In her years of teaching at the middle, high, and college levels, she has found one key that has held most important to student success: inquiry based hands on learning.
      Experience UGA is a program that allows freshmen at Clarke County High Schools to come to UGA, tour, learn about college, and participate in a STEM activity. Each year I have been at Georgia, I have had the privilege of leading several experience UGA labs with MARS. The lab I typically do with these students, and adore for outreach programs as well, focuses on chemoreceptors and mechanoreceptors in marine invertebrates and how these biological traits impact the manner in which organisms locate and consume their prey and predators. In short, we give the students food and predator scents (pea, shrimp, blue crab, grey lined sea star, etc) and allow them to design the experiment based on what animal they are assigned (ranging anywhere from serpent star, also known as brittle star, to tulip snails). These kids are given the opportunity to see for themselves an animal they almost always have never worked with before, as well as allows them to use their own investigative skills to create their experiment. I have never seen a student leave our lab with a bad attitude after this experiment.

Experience UGA seeing a channel whelk for the first time

       I think with science it is crucial to include these experiments that are specifically inquiry exploration based. They are the lifeblood of science as a discipline. In considering doing these units, you have to wonder about time. Many of the activities Capps has given us say they require 3 weeks; one activity doesn’t have to take that much time. You have to adapt to know what is appropriate and what is not, and that comes with time. Using these lessons in small, bite sized chunks can allow for successful learning and not consume all of your time.

Florida Conch and Tulip snail, predatory invertebrates. To give you a frame of reference.