an Inquiry Project Proposal in 5 easy steps
Asking your students to come up with their own inquiry project proposal is no small feat. It’s important that we give our students clear guidelines as to what we expect to see. Outlining a good driving question, SMART goal, project objectives and timelines is key to ensuring students have a well thought-out plan.
Our project proposal workbook covers 5 essential elements to support a deeper learning for any inquiry, PBL or passion project. It is important to bake these 5 elements right into your project planning. Project proposal are not 1 more thing to do, inquiry proposals are very much apart of the project process. Check out how teachers are building their project plans with “proposal” as a stage or milestone within the project!
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inquiry project proposal in 5 easy steps
1. Create a Driving Question
Students need to come up with a driving question that sustains their interest over time. Students can use this driving question workbook to frame their project goals.
2. Set a SMART Goal
Great! Now they have an idea. It’s time to turn the investigations and ideations into action! What do students intend to do or learn in this project? Students first need to set a goal and pressure test it. Students should identify more specifically what they are trying to accomplish and why. Is what they are set out to do is actually doable and realistic? Ok. Managing time. Students need to set realistic deadlines. What can they achieve by when? It’s time to take that large goal and break it down into daily, weekly and hourly tasks. What can be achieved and by when? By doing this, students are building those executive functioning skills needed to tackle such an open-ended project.
3. Define project Objectives
It’s time to make detailed statements describing ways in which students intend to meet their goal. Simply answer the 5 W’s: who, what, when, where and why around their project. Setting clear objectives will help students illustrate what investigation needs to be done, when it needs to be done and how it needs to be done.
4. Identify Target Audience
Now that students have determined a direction for their project that is both relevant and meaningful to them, they need to think about who their work is for (other than themselves). In order to produce the right kind of final product, students should determine who their target audience is and how to best reach them. How we present our work is determined largely by who is appreciating it.
5. Plan the Final Product
Now that students know who the work is for, they can begin to think about how they will present their work. Students should choose a final product that best applies to their audience and best showcases their research, solution and findings. Spinndle has a resource that helps students determine their final product with over 100 final product ideas to get your students thinking.
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Spinndle has interactive project planning templates on the platform. Scaffold higher-level tasks (driving question, solution-finding, project proposal etc.) for any PBL, inquiry or passion project. Simply add templates to your project plans and watch personalized student projects progress in real-time.