Using the Inquiry Process to Motivate and Engage all (Including Struggling) Readers

With increasingly rigorous standards and mounting high stakes testing, it seems harder than ever to motivate and engage struggling readers. In this article the authors provide an overview of the inquiry learning process, which details how providing students with choice and opportunities to collaborate with peers can keep students invested in their own learning and progress. Within the framework of standards and/or a unit of study, students are coached toward choosing a personally meaningful research question in which they are given freedom to explore the answer through a variety of self-selected texts. Inquiry learning can be woven into already existing units of study or can be used to create an entirely new classroom project. The authors walk readers through the inquiry process with a teacher vignette that provides a step-by-step plan that can be implemented in any classroom.