I'm very excited about the "Next Generation Science Standards" - check out this link if you haven't heard about them yet:
http://www.nextgenscience.org/ !
They are currently in their second draft format and will be revised once again to be fully published some time during the Winter/Spring of this year (perhaps later if there are delays). The goal of these standards is for us to finally have a national science curriculum where all 50 states will accept these standards that not only focuses on content but also the skills part of doing and learning science. (I'm already speaking to my fellow science teachers at my school to see if we could put a study grant in to study and revise our own curriculum- the goal being that we need to design a K-12 curriculum map of what we teach in science.)
The topic of these standards and why they were being designed came up in a workshop that I was attending yesterday. The big word in science teaching for at least the last two decades has been "inquiry" with all of it's various components. However, as a 5th year teacher, I still feel that a lot of science teachers can't really define what inquiry is, what it looks like in the science classroom, and what inquiry actually is not.
I am a big proponent of inquiry in the classroom, but even for me- where I think I'm doing inquiry-type lessons and activities- I'm not 100% sure if I'm hitting the mark.
Wikipedia (how scientific of me, right?) shares the following definition of inquiry-based learning:
Inquiry-based learning is primarily a pedagogical method, developed during the discovery learning
movement of the 1960s as a response to traditional forms of instruction
- where students were required to memorize information from
instructional materials.[3] Inquiry learning is a form of active learning, where progress is assessed by how well people develop experimental and analytic skills.
