The "trends" in education lately have been: differentiation, inquiry learning, layered/tiered teaching and a few more. ICT is always there (obviously) and probably a few I'm forgetting. The thing is, they all have something wonderful in common: teaching students to THINK. Also, they all can be used simultaneously. How cool! Basically, I think we're acknowledging that in education students are all different and need/want to learn in different ways. The thing about inquiry is that it allows students to really THINK about what they care about within a given topic and pursue it. It's really cool to see students thinking about how things like.... say... space... effects THEM and what THEY want to know.
If I had to suggest ways to implement the inquiry process, I would say ask students what they care about and what interests them. Have them write it down somewhere. Write the questions BIG. Make a bulletin board of questions with little slips of paper next to them. Get them used to asking questions (and not always having them immediately answered). Make questions FUN. On my bulletin board, I had one color paper for questions and another color for students to post next to the questions if they think they had an answer. Then at the end of class, if we had a few minutes, we would go to the question board and see how we were doing. Kids loved it. It was casual. It got them used to asking/answering/thinking about questions. It was just a start, but it was great to see.
If I had to suggest ways to implement the inquiry process, I would say ask students what they care about and what interests them. Have them write it down somewhere. Write the questions BIG. Make a bulletin board of questions with little slips of paper next to them. Get them used to asking questions (and not always having them immediately answered). Make questions FUN. On my bulletin board, I had one color paper for questions and another color for students to post next to the questions if they think they had an answer. Then at the end of class, if we had a few minutes, we would go to the question board and see how we were doing. Kids loved it. It was casual. It got them used to asking/answering/thinking about questions. It was just a start, but it was great to see.