The essence of open-inquiry teaching

The Biomind program is a pilot project in Israeli high schools in which eleventh- and twelfth grade biology students are trained to conduct an open inquiry. This paper describes a follow-up study of Israeli high school teachers who implemented this challenging and open-inquiry curriculum. During this follow-up, several participating teachers conducted authentic open inquiry, formulated several logically related questions, wrote a proposal, and conducted an experiment. The difficulties that the teachers encountered during their inquiry process were similar to those that their students encountered in conducting an open inquiry. These difficulties served as a basis for the design and implementation of workshops in which the participating teachers suggested techniques to help students successfully conducting an open inquiry. In addition, the results indicated that the workshops improved both teachers’ understanding of the essence of the open inquiry process and teachers’ pedagogical knowledge in teaching an open inquiry.