My journey to Ithaca actually began long before this subject in my masters did. It turns out I started on the journey into inquiry learning the moment I first really engaged with an economics assignment in Year 11 many moons ago. Whatever anachronistic aspect of the discipline I happened to be examining is well-beyond the scope of this reflection, but what is redolent to me now is the deep engagement I felt – I was lost in something big. But it wasn’t the task I was lost in, it was the inquiry.
Over time I have collected essential questions that I know will foster that same sense of deep engagement in the students that I teach. I attend PD, visit classrooms, chat in the staffroom and undertake further study like a larcenous magpie looking not for knowledge, but for interesting ways of encouraging students to think and to engage.
The first task in Inquiry Learning showed me a wide range of search, curation, collaboration and creation tools that I had little idea about. From padlet to scoopit to vengage, I found tools that could facilitate better, bolder, deeper and more engaging inquiry than I had previously known. I was comfortable enough with my capacity to enable students to search (though slightly embarrassed to be told that “no-one has used the + and – in Google since the 1990’s), but I learnt a lot about digital literacy tools that have enhanced my pedagogy and also my ability to share professional practice.
The second task in Inquiry Learning has grown to become a labour of love. Though universities have had design and start-up labs for many years, the entrepreneurial thinking space is a relatively new space for schools to be in. Though the seeds of this unit are still germinating, “The Pitch” unit has given a new set of eyes and encouraged me to look widely for new professional learning opportunities. As I write this, I have just finished a proposal to my Principal to visit the d.school at Stanford University in California to learn yet more tools of engagement and inquiry. It’s an area that I might never have pushed into, but for this subject.
In the end, I 
am not interested in things I fully understand. Teaching the subject matter is just the veneer. In any given classroom there are truths and wonders and oddities and curiosities and big thoughts just beneath the surface that occasionally break through like the humps of a sea monster and then disappear. For me, inquiry involves looking for a way to tempt those monsters to the surface. To create a space where students can take intellectual leaps, see connections between things they didn’t see before and look at the world with a transformed perspective. That is what we really do, that is the place where teachers really live.
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Journey to Ithaca 