Inquiry-Based Learning

I completely agree with an expression used on the article "What is inquiry-based learning?" that is posted on the website: www.thirteen.org. The expression says: "Tell me and I will forget, show me and I will remember, involve me and I will understand." If a teacher does not involve student in the classroom, chances are that students will forget what the teacher was talking about. When students are involved, they will be able to understand and learn concepts and remember them easier. For me as a math teacher, inquiry-based learning is critical and I use it especially when I teach new concepts. For example: when I teach my students how to graph, I engage them first to gather data. Then I ask them to use tables on their graphing calculators to graph their information. They study the data and often they find the type of the relationship and the equation that represent their data. When I start teaching how to graph, they show good understanding of how to graph and what a graph means.