Finding the Perfect Amount of Challenge: Inquiry-Based Activity

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As a student, I was never a great fan of inquiry-based learning because it can be frustrating or it can be so obvious that it's simply not motivating. In fact, I much rather sit back and let the teacher do the work while I "soak up" the knowledge. On the other hand, I can appreciate it in the sense that by forcing me to find out the answers for myself and challenging me, I learned the materials better (even though I was properly "stressed out" from it). As an aspiring teacher, the benefits of inquiry-based learning have been drilled into my mind by both my education courses and the TEAM evaluation rubric.

This activity has been very similar to numerous ones we had to do for the other education classes. In this activity, we had to find web sites for the students to use to answer questions. This is where website evaluation came in handy. Since the websites are to suit my purpose of designing an inquiry-based activity, my priority was to find websites that serve the goal of enriching the students' learning. Since I was not using the information on the website to publish a paper, I was not too concerned with picking only official websites for the Leaning Tower of Pisa (topic of my activity). With my experience of being frustrated with inquiry-based learning, I also wanted to make sure that the activity was not too challenging or too obvious. However, I feel that whether the final product is properly challenging while not frustrating is still a subjective matter (see my inquiry-based activity on my website).

As I reflect upon inquiry-based learning and the process of designing such activities, I often find the task of balancing the amount of challenge to be tricky. On one hand, there's no point of an inquiry-based activity if there's no challenge. On the other hand, too much challenge is very frustrating and exhausting for the learners.  This problem is exacerbated by the fact that learners inside each classroom will be at different ability levels. Maybe an extra credit section could help challenge the high-performing students? And more teacher scaffolding could be provided for lower-performing students? Then again, how do we preserve high efficacy and high self-esteem at the same time?