When Rachel Bright taught her students four years ago about the effect sunlight has on plants, she used a textbook’s pictures and descriptions.

This year she bought a houseplant, and students created their own experiments.

Each student has a leaf inside of a clear plastic cup with some water.

Some students put their cup in the closet. Others used the cupboards in the classroom while still more tried covering their experiment with a black garbage bag.

The leaf that thrived, even growing a new leaf, was in the sunlight. This year, the fourth-graders at Radley Elementary logged their observations and drew conclusions from their work instead of reading and memorizing from a textbook.

“It teaches them by asking questions, so kids become critical thinkers,” Bright said.

Bright changed her approach because of involvement with a movement stirring among educators and some money from the Office of Public Instruction.

The Science Inquiry Learning in Classrooms grant was awarded this summer to the Helena School District to improve student academic achievement in areas of science inquiry, physical sciences and life sciences in classrooms from third to sixth grades.

Bright is one of 15 elementary teachers participating in the two-year commitment where they will learn about inquiry-based instruction.

“It makes teachers think on a whole new level,” she said.

The group meets once a month at Front Street Learning Center and is required to complete online assignments.

They recently spent three hours playing the role students learning what it feels like to be in an inquiry-based classroom, said instructional coach Mary Larsen.

Teachers also earn 12 graduate-level credits through Montana State University.

Joe Furshong, the district’s student services administrator, said there is a big shift happening among educators, and this grant assists in that movement.

“It helps teachers be more of a facilitator in the discovery process in their own learning,” he said.

Much of the process is questioning, Larsen said.

“It helps them draw their own conclusions and is more powerful for students,” she said.

Mark Cracolice, chemistry department chairman at the University of Montana, says the idea of inquiry-based learning is, in essence returning to the basics and doing science as science is done.

“We’ve got away from it in the last 100 years,” he said. The fundamental idea of the approach is to get as close to authentic scientific investigation in the classroom as possible, said Cracolice.

The big advantage, Cracolice said, is not memorizing principals; it’s learning to think like a scientist.

Paul Phillips has been using the approach for the past five years in his chemistry classes at Capital High School.

He has worked with a group of educators to write an inquiry-based chemistry curriculum for high school juniors. Phillips also has been a liaison to the teacher working with the SILC grant.

He says this approach makes his students become strong learners because it teaches them to problem solve. Phillips said he also believes it has improved the attitudes and participation of his students because they can individually gather data and draw conclusions without having to be like everyone else.

This isn’t how Bright learned science when she was in school.

“I remember just reading and being tested on what we learned,” she said. “This kind of learning can be frustrating, but it’s more permanent and long lasting than memorization learning is.”