Inquiry based teaching: An experience with THE TEMI E.U. project

With the aim of giving new skills to engage their students with exciting new resources and of supporting teachers in their work to implement IBSE (Inquiry Based Science Education) in their classrooms, at the universities of Milan and Salerno various didactical activities for high school teachers have been planned and implemented in the last years. In particular, the Physics Education Research Group of Milan, one of the 13 partners of the European project TEMI (Teaching Enquiry with Mysteries Incorporated), has planned and organized a training session with a group of 34 high school teachers that have been held in Salerno. Teachers have been involved in directly making them experience the 5E inquiry methodology to be tested in their classes. Teachers have been engaged by a suitably chosen physics mystery and fostered to explore, to discover and find explanations of the mystery in order to practice scientific investigation. All the IBSE activities proposed had the main purpose of reducing the gap between standard high school practice and well-known education techniques, by offering concrete strategies and specific tools for physics teaching. In this work, we will briefly describe our training experience and outline teachers' practice in their classrooms.