As you can deduce from the title, I spent the week primarily with Freshman. Xenia is on a sort of rotation with research projects to keep the resources from being stretched too thin. The Juniors and seniors have more stringent testing demands, so they tend to perform their major research projects earlier in the year. As we close in on the end of the school year, I'm spending a lot more of my time with underclassmen. I spent the latter half of last week preparing some resources and materials in collaborations with a language arts teacher, as her 9th grade classes were doing research on the renaissance. The teacher had been wanting to try a new approach, having them prepare an annotated bibliography first. They were to locate three sources, evaluate them, then cite the sources properly giving a summation of the relevant content and selecting a quote from the source material (1.1.1, 1.1.4, 1.1.5, 1.3.1, 1.3.3). We collaborated on the design a little and pooled some resources for them that were reliable, but not always easily identifiable as such to help them evaluate web sources.
It's possible that we were overreaching a little, but there were some pretty obvious problems with the process. There were some very strange disconnects in their thought processes that, in retrospect, go a long way toward illuminating the AASL inquiry standards. The students were performing some of the standards admirably, but were clearly lacking some of the other standards, and it made their research projects resemble Swiss cheese: big holes.
For example: most of the students were willing to create the bibliography, and they identified the need for three sources, at least one of which had to be print. They were told, in advance, the overall research question, so that they understood the reasons for the research. Unfortunately, they let go of that knowledge pretty quickly. What happened instead was a sort of blind inquiry: looking for information without any motive or cause or understanding. They were performing half of standard 1.1.1, and parts of 1.1.4, but they were lacking understanding of the inquiry process as a whole. Many of them found information, but they had no idea why they selected it or what to do with it. The bibliography was just another assignment, not connected to the research paper that was to follow. That stutter left most of them testing their dispositions in action (1.2) which ended up creating a lot more frustration and confusion than we had expected. Before the project began I discussed with the class a lot of research strategies, tips and tricks, so they knew how to conduct some of their research, but they were lost as to why they were conducting it. In the end, the teacher and I got most of the students there, but the process was a bit more difficult than it probably could have been if we'd planned a different strategy. Next time, I'll be sure to link the instruction I give more closely with the teacher's. It isn't two separate topics: research and then the Renaissance. The two are interdependent in this case. Hindsight = 20/20.
I also learned that, in a situation like that where students are confused and frustrated, it's very easy to fall into the trap of reinforcing learned helplessness. Students can lose all their motivation in a situation like that, and they just raise their hands and ask questions for every little thing. And it isn't enough to just spout out answers or suggestions, encouraging that helplessness. Most of them were very close to a zone of proximal development, and I'm afraid I missed some opportunities early on that could have led to more productive moments.
I finally got to meet the other librarians in the district. We came together for a meeting to discuss the end-of-year inventory schedule, and some other issues. The meeting cut short a very interesting discussion on filtering and the criteria used to reject websites. More specifically, what criteria the librarians use to act on staff requests. It all started with Pandora, a music website that is really pretty appropriate, and a teacher wanted to use it to expose her students to big band music. The issue wasn't with content, it was with bandwidth concerns, because the network access for the entire district flows from the high school, down. Unblocking it for one teacher is no problem, really, but if large numbers of teachers or students listen to it, the rest of the district could be slowed to a crawl. A lively discussion ensued on what justifications can/should exist for blocking sites, and I was exposed to some perspectives I hadn't considered before. It's a more complicated issue than I had previously thought.
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It sounds like a good learning experience. It seems like a lot more work needs to be done to help students use a research model. Does Xenia use a model such as the Big Six district-wide?
ReplyDeleteYou are certainly right that the key is careful coordination and planning with the classroom teacher - it sounds so easy but in fact it is something that is very hard. Sometimes you just have to start working with one interested teacher and develop some really good projects and then let it spread.
Certainly the new standards focus on dispositions and self assessment strategies is part of the solution - now if we can just figure out how to teach it :-) Are you discussing this in EDT733?
We are, in fact this example came into play a week before a discussion on several of the concepts involved, fit in nicely.
ReplyDeleteXenia does not have a district research model, I'd be interested to check with some districts that do and see how effective that approach is.