New Year
Well the holidays gave me a chance to think. I still like the overall model I'm working from but I have serious doubts about applying it in a sole charge school. The reason for this is lack of numbers. I have the strong feeling that a true inquiry learning approach requires numbers - especially at the brainstorming - question building stage. The second worry are the lack of essential skills to undertake an inquiry. By this I mean that the seniors have reasonable study skills but they actually need to develop a plan in order to reach a solution. If they dont work from a plan they tend to wander aimlessly about.
This term we started with some work on paragraphing for writing stories. They all knew the basics for paragraphs in writing but not that you could use these skills for locating information. During discussion it emerged that when they have a problem to solve they go looking for the ANSWER. But unless this answer is obvious they quickly become stuck or go down blind alleys.
We discussed this further and I decided that we would develop a plan for finding information.
At first it was very simple
Go to the library
Go to the reference section.
Get an encyclopedia.
Look up the topic.
This proved to be an excellent start and lead to the discovery of keywords for searching. They quickly realised they couldn't look up the question so they needed to identify the keywords within the question. Or develop two keywords around the question. As an example we had the question: "where does Valentines day come from?" The key words for this were identified as Valentines day and history.
We stuck to encyclopedias and tried out a few searches. The plan evolved to using the main keyword to find the topic and the second one to skim the first sentence of each paragraph. They had tremendous success with this and even the year fours could at least find relevant paragraphs. Next we developed key word searching into the non fiction section. They used a similar plan with the exception that they look up the keywords in the index. Because our library is rather small this had limited success but they could see that it was efficient and useful if there was a book available.
The next step was to repeat this with Encarta and once again they had to describe their plan before starting. We then applied the same techniques to the Journal Library database and then to Googgle. Each time it was the same. Form a question - identify the key words - make up a plan for whatever resource they were going to use. An activity to encourage this was the two minute search game. Everyone had the same question and for the first couple of times shared keywords. They then made up a plan to locate the answer in under two minutes.
They are becoming very proficient at this and the older pupils have pulled back from their reliance on the internet. The good old encyclopedia is often the most efficient wat to find an answer. It can often be faster than encarta.
I am now doing an Infolink paper on Action Learning and the methods in there at this stage seem very similar. I'm now thinking about the next stage. That is - what are they going to do with the information once they find it ?
This term we started with some work on paragraphing for writing stories. They all knew the basics for paragraphs in writing but not that you could use these skills for locating information. During discussion it emerged that when they have a problem to solve they go looking for the ANSWER. But unless this answer is obvious they quickly become stuck or go down blind alleys.
We discussed this further and I decided that we would develop a plan for finding information.
At first it was very simple
Go to the library
Go to the reference section.
Get an encyclopedia.
Look up the topic.
This proved to be an excellent start and lead to the discovery of keywords for searching. They quickly realised they couldn't look up the question so they needed to identify the keywords within the question. Or develop two keywords around the question. As an example we had the question: "where does Valentines day come from?" The key words for this were identified as Valentines day and history.
We stuck to encyclopedias and tried out a few searches. The plan evolved to using the main keyword to find the topic and the second one to skim the first sentence of each paragraph. They had tremendous success with this and even the year fours could at least find relevant paragraphs. Next we developed key word searching into the non fiction section. They used a similar plan with the exception that they look up the keywords in the index. Because our library is rather small this had limited success but they could see that it was efficient and useful if there was a book available.
The next step was to repeat this with Encarta and once again they had to describe their plan before starting. We then applied the same techniques to the Journal Library database and then to Googgle. Each time it was the same. Form a question - identify the key words - make up a plan for whatever resource they were going to use. An activity to encourage this was the two minute search game. Everyone had the same question and for the first couple of times shared keywords. They then made up a plan to locate the answer in under two minutes.
They are becoming very proficient at this and the older pupils have pulled back from their reliance on the internet. The good old encyclopedia is often the most efficient wat to find an answer. It can often be faster than encarta.
I am now doing an Infolink paper on Action Learning and the methods in there at this stage seem very similar. I'm now thinking about the next stage. That is - what are they going to do with the information once they find it ?
posted by Eastern Districts Schools at 1:11 AM
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