It is a truth universally acknowledged that every student in need of information must turn to Google. This easily accessible search engine has revolutionised and democratised the research process and holds so many potential benefits for our students. However, it’s not the sole repository of all knowledge and it’s important for us to show our students that other sources exist and to equip them with the skills to explore outside of their comfort zones.
Many of the Year 7s I’m working with said they find it hard to find more detailed, relevant information when they are researching and noted that they often get overwhelmed by all the options when they search using Google. Therefore, this week I’ll be showing them a variety of other sources they can use as they research for their assessments on Youthful Voices. To help with this, I created an infographic designed to give them a quick overview of some of the different resources we offer in our school. By providing them with a variety of different places to locate their information I’m also hoping to introduce them to the concept of lateral reading and emphasise the importance of cross-checking the information they find.
Next on the research skills agenda is source evaluation, so stay tuned for more on this next week!
This term I have the wonderful opportunity to work with one of our Year 7 English classes on a Guided Inquiry unit to help them understand the concept of Youthful Voices. In my last lesson with them I gave them a survey to complete which was based on the School Library Impact Measure (SLIM) survey model. The questions are quite simple:
What do you already know about youthful voices?
How interested are you in this topic on a scale of 1-5 (1 being not very interested, 5 being very interested)?
How much do you feel you already know about this topic (1 being not much, 5 being a lot)?
How confident do you feel about doing research for school or fo your own needs (1 being not very confident, 5 being very confident)?
When you do research, what do you generally find easy to do?
When you do research, what do you generally find difficult to do?
Despite a lot of student absences and technical difficulties, with the help of their class teachers over the last week I’ve been able to get the vast majority of students to complete this survey. Their results are quite interesting! As I’d expect from a class of high achievers, most of the students feel either confident or very confident about their research skills. However, there’s still a number of students who are either ambivalent or still a little unsure about the process.
As expected due to their confidence levels, a lot of students in this class said that finding information is one of the easy aspects of the research process for them. A number were also confident in their abilities to put that information into their own words, write their responses and present their research to the class.
Despite their confidence in finding information, a significant number expressed difficulty in finding more relevant, detailed information. They also found it hard to decide which information was useful for their purposes and which sources are reliable. A number also identified that deciding on a question, putting information into their own words, and writing their responses were difficult aspects of the research process for them.
I’ll be seeing them again shortly and plan to have a brief discussion about their responses. Hopefully this will help alleviate any anxiety students might be feeling about their research, since they will be able to see that their feelings are a natural part of the process. I’m also going to try using these responses to help each student with their individual needs by targeting specific skills as we move through the next few weeks.
This term I’ve been fortunate enough to have not just one, but three teachers interested in working with me on an inquiry unit designed to support their curriculum areas while developing our students’ research skills and information fluency. At the start of each year I put out a reminder to our teaching staff about the resources and services I provide to help them and save them time, but I strongly suspect that in the chaos at start of Term 1 many who might be willing are too overwhelmed by everything going on to take up my offers. Last term I put out a survey to assess the needs of my colleagues, with 66% of respondents stating that they’d value one-off or ongoing research lessons. Clearly this survey has sparked something amongst my colleagues, since I’ve spent a fair chunk of time over the last three weeks collaboratively planning inquiry units to help them out!
The two classes I’ll be working with this term are a Year 7 English class exploring a unit on Youthful Voices for their new syllabus and a Year 11 Community and Family Studies class aiming to develop their research skills before they start their research projects in the HSC course. The framework I’ve been using to shape our collaborative units is the Guided Inquiry Design approach I first encountered while retraining as a TL. Back in 2021 I had a lot of fun adjusting one of our existing units on Shakespeare, and it was an enjoyable challenge applying my understanding of this inquiry framework to these new, unfamiliar units.
My first step was to explain the Guided Inquiry process and its benefits to my associates. I therefore created this brief presentation introducing the framework. One day I hope to present it to the entire staff body to showcase the potential of this approach.
During our initial planning meeting, we discussed what outcomes the classroom teacher wanted to meet and what their eventual summative assessments would be; from these we created a series of guiding questions to help structure our students’ initial research. Then, using a planning template I’d made, we made a rough plan for each of the stages of the Guided Inquiry process and allocated responsibility for each aspect of the unit.
As a result of these planning sessions, I now have a very clear understanding of what each teacher wishes to achieve for their class and my role in supporting their vision for the unit. I’m not due to co-teach the Year 11 class until later in the term, but I’ve already been into the Year 7 class to introduce the inquiry unit and discuss their previous experiences of research. To do this, I created another Canva presentation alongside a survey based on the School Library Impact Measure (SLIM) survey model.
Our first lesson with Year 7 was a mixed bag – we had some great discussion about their research experiences but had technical issues with logging into the computers to complete the survey (sidenote: why is it that whenever I book the laptops, half the set decides to update in my hour of need?!). As a result, I didn’t get to give them much time to start exploring some ideas for their research topics, but I did manage to go through some simple Google search tips which their classroom teachers will reinforce in their lessons this week.
Next week I’ll see them again for another research lesson, where I’ll help them formulate their specific inquiry questions using the question stems on the above presentation. As always, the biggest issues when collaboratively planning and teaching a program like this are a lack of time and the number of interruptions we experience. Already I’ve needed to reschedule the two Year 7 lessons due to other programs using the library space or assemblies taking over that lesson, and I have a strong suspicion that the library will be out of action again during our scheduled lesson next week due to exams. But at least we have a plan for how we can support our students, and I’m super excited to see where these two units take me!
