 This inquiry philosophy matches my really simple teaching motto, which is I call it thinking to learn, that people are much more likely to be learning something if they're thinking. And when you're passive in a lecture hall, it's possible, in fact, maybe probable, that you're not thinking all that much. And so with my colleagues here in our community college, colleagues, we developed these curricula that have the students working together in groups in which they are thinking pretty much all the time. And they're asking themselves questions, they're trying to solve problems, and they're trying to get at the same learning outcomes that they might in a general introductory content class, but through very different set of means. So the means are these interactive activities which require thinking and presenting and questioning without the faculty member telling them that they're getting it right or wrong very often. And there are a lot of settings where this has been true in science classes for a long time. The lab setting, for example, a lot of classes have large lectures in which lots of information is passed in one direction, and then a lab setting where problem solving is done. And these classes kind of flip that on its head. In fact, most of the classroom time is in small group work doing class setting, presenting to each other questioning ideas. You know, they're not just constructing ideas out of nothing. There are activities that they're doing. They're modeling or they're doing computer simulations or they're playing with rocks or whatever depending on the content. So they're doing some kind of activity and then they're making meaning from that activity. There is actually a team of quite a few western instructors and community college instructors from Wacken Community College, Northwest Indian College, Everett Community College and Skagit Valley College. And they've all contributed into both the initial design and the revisions that we've been doing by way of practicing using these in the classroom and improving them as we go along. So it's been a great team to work with. I've learned a lot from developing the curriculum and teaching them and it has really strongly impacted how I teach in geology. So I now pay a lot more attention to formative assessment. I would say maybe that's one of the biggest things is that I know what angle I want my students to get to. I have some content outcomes which I share with them but I spend a lot more time informally assessing my students along the way. It used to be that I would only do summative assessment and then I'd say, oh, bummer, they didn't get it and then there's not much to do at that point. So the formative assessment along the way that we do in these courses has significantly changed the way I teach all my other classes. It is much better for me because I'm a more complete teacher. I know what I'm doing now. I know what I want the students to learn. I know how to try to get them there. And I like to believe that it's better for the students because they not only have someone who knows what he is doing in terms of how to teach but also they actually retain the material better or they understand the concepts better rather than me just spewing facts and just hoping whatever sticks, sticks. It's encouraged me to step back more and be more of a facilitator or a coach and help the learning happen for the students rather than a more didactic approach where I would tell the students the answer and expect them to just passively assimilate it. It's more about facilitating an environment in which they are more likely to wrestle with the ideas and the evidence and come up with the appropriate claims themselves with instructor support of course. But it comes from them and in order for that to happen I've found that I have to really step back into a facilitator role and that's hard sometimes because we want to be in control but I've found that I have to relinquish the control to the students. We're not trained how to teach this way as graduate students. We've been taught in that didactic way for the most part and it really takes a leap of faith for an instructor to step back the way Emily was describing and to trust the activities and to trust the pedagogy but once you see how these students grasp these ideas in a way that you didn't even know before because as Sue was saying you'd go to the summative assessment you go to a midterm or a final test and you say it's too bad they didn't get it they must not have studied hard enough and this is about you'll know who's getting it and who's not all the way through the course and that's really gratifying to have the students start to understand that this way of learning is so successful that this is the way they want to teach.