Inquiry Teaching Inquiry teaching is a process of asking and answering key social studies questions. Students develop questions, collect and organize data related to the questions, analyze the data, and draw inferences or conclusions about the data to answer their questions. A hallmark of inquiry teaching is student activity.
Teachers facilitate student learning.
Although there are a number of variations, inquiry teaching basically involves five steps. Propose a hypothesis. Developing a hypothesis will help to guide student research. Locating and collecting data is key. This stage allows students to develop key social studies skills identified in the TEKS, e.g., selecting relevant versus irrelevant data, evaluating the value of primary versus secondary data, organize and interpret information, classifying and categorizing, presenting the information etc.