Inquiry-based teaching aims to increase student engagement through the development of the hands-on, minds-on skills, such as critical thinking, collaboration, and communication, needed for the 21st century (The Partnership for 21st Century Skills 2015). This approach respects the complexities of the learning process, values the knowledge and experience students bring to the classroom, and prioritizes active problem solving, communication of findings, and the shared construction of new ideas. This notion of inquiry is at the heart of several pedagogical initiatives including project-based instruction, maker-centered learning, and the 5E learning cycle. The 5E Instructional Model, developed by the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study (BSCS), evolved from previous learning cycles (Lawson 2002) and incorporates findings from research on teaching and cognition. The 5E model includes five stages: engagement, exploration, explanation, elaboration, and evaluation (Bybee et al. 2006). This article describes the 5E Learning Cycle and provides an overview of how a teacher candidate engaged her students in a 5E learning cycle to explore the process of saponification and learn the concept of pH.