 I first encountered inquiry-based learning and teaching as a beginning graduate student in the physics department at the University of Washington. And as an undergrad, I had been a physics major and a very traditional program where I sat in lectures and, you know, did my best afterwards to read through the book and my notes and figure it all out. But at the UW, I was a TA. The students meet once a week and go through some more interactive materials where they are asked questions and they discuss their ideas together. And the TAs are asked to facilitate that. And each week on Mondays, we would all meet together, all the TAs and the faculty members from the physics education group to prepare. And the TAs, us, we would go through the materials as if we were students. And I quickly realized that I didn't understand all of the physics topics that I felt I should have understood or that had been covered in my undergraduate physics major. So these were all familiar topics, Newton's Third Law, the work energy theorem, things I had studied and thought, well, I understand, that's basic stuff, you know. But the materials would ask questions and we TAs would have to work out the answers for ourselves. We'd question each other. You'd have to take risks. You would answer questions, not sure if you were right or not. But the other students, you know, would correct you or give you feedback or build on your ideas and as a group, you would progress through and make sense of it. And this was new to me and a complete revelation about what it means to understand and to learn physics. So for me, it not only improved my understanding of these basic topics immensely, but really caused me to kind of rethink what it means to learn and understand. As a graduate student at UW, I had started out in a traditional area of physics research, experimental physics research. But after encountering this new way of learning and teaching, I was just, I fell in love with it and I knew that's what I wanted to do. So I actually switched my research focus and earned my PhD for studying the learning and teaching of physics with the physics education group, which is led by Professor Lillian McDermott at UW. And so after that first experience, I just never went back. And after my PhD ending up here at Western, you know, my first year or two of teaching as I think is probably the case for many, many new teachers, I was just trying to survive and get through. So I didn't, I didn't do a whole lot of inquiry based teaching in my courses. I did a lot of traditional lecturing and then as I got more comfortable in the classroom, started to come back to this other way of doing it and incorporating more student centered activities and opportunities for the students to make sense of the ideas. So, you know, gradually over the next phase of my teaching career, I started talking less and tried to get the students talking more. And that kind of led to the project in the labs, whereas the department, we made a commitment to changing the labs here at Western in our introductory physics course to be more student centered and give students the opportunities to make sense of ideas for themselves, to ask questions of each other, to develop answers together rather than being told by the instructor. And so now here at Western, every student who goes through our introductory physics program has that experience in the labs where they are asked to figure things out collaboratively and the instructor is a guide and a facilitator rather than the source of the knowledge. So our introductory physics program here at Western is, it's a large enrollment program. We have several hundreds of students at any given time in the course. There's multiple lecture sections. Since all the students from the different lecture sections take the same laboratory part of the course, they all share this experience of learning physics as a process of inquiry. So there's a well-established syllabus and it's got a pretty lengthy list of topics. Bring students loose to explore, you know, force and motion on their own to figure out what questions they're interested in, to design experiments from scratch to answer those while exciting is not practical in a situation where there is an established syllabus and a fairly long list of topics that students need to be exposed to. We decided rather than open-ended inquiry to have a guided approach. So we kind of established the scope of inquiry. We framed things for students by asking questions, giving students specific physical systems to think about and apply the concepts to. We sort of established a pathway using guided questions and experiments that leads to kind of where we would like the students to end up in terms of being able to understand and apply the important concepts, the ones that they need to understand in order to go on to the next part of the course.