INQUIRY DESIGN MODEL

The College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework for State Social Studies Standards (National Council for the Social Studies, 2013) ushered in an important opportunity to articulate a common vernacular for and a curricular approach to inquiry. Featuring four distinct but inter-connected dimensions, the C3 Inquiry Arc lays out a process for supporting students to ask questions about our social world, use concepts and tools from the disciplines that make up social studies, analyze and argue about what they have learned, and apply that knowledge to the challenges that face our world today. While the C3 Framework was an important step in clarifying what inquiry should ideally look like in social studies, teachers understandably wanted more. Teachers have rightfully wondered: How do I teach the Civil War or the Civil Rights Movement or the Gilded Age through inquiry? How do the four dimensions apply to wealth inequality or teaching the three branches of government or push and pull patterns of immigration? We wrote this design book wanting to understand, how do you really (we mean, really) write an inquiry? Where do you start and how do you finish? What ideas come in-between? How do we teach others to do the IDM without falling down the rabbit hole of making things too complex, too convoluted, or too esoteric? Could we be as clear about a process for developing an IDM as we were in defining the C3 Inquiry Arc? As methods instructors, we couldn't help but tackle this challenge and this book is the product of a 4-year conversation (and on some days, argument) about how exactly we do IDM.