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A Year of Firsts!

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Hello everyone! My name is Rachelle Johnson and I am the guest blogger this week. I am a Secondary Science Teacher in Norman, Oklahoma. I teach Biology and Zoology at Norman High School (GO TIGERS!). Not only is it my first year doing a Guided Inquiry unit; it is also my first year at NHS and my first year in Oklahoma, needless to say this is turning out to be a very fruitful year!

In the past I have struggled with student engagement and am constantly met with the “why is this important?” question. So I love finding new ways to engage my students in meaningful scientific discussions. Guided Inquiry sounded like the solution to all my problems. It offered an opportunity for my students to discover why the things we learn in Biology are important to them as  individuals.

I first learned about Guided Inquiry through our Librarians during a professional development day in the Fall. Not really understanding what it was and just hearing the word “research” I instantly thought: Not for my Freshmen. That was definitely closed-minded thinking on my part. Luckily my district values student lead learning and sent me along with other colleagues to training early this spring.

The first thing I learned is that any student can do this. It doesn’t matter what grade you teach or whether you have English language learners or you have a group of special education students integrated in with your general ed kids. Everyone is capable. The second thing I learned was that I was already doing some of the stages in Guided Inquiry! Minor changes to my tried-and-true lessons and they fit right in.

And here it is the cherry on top of an already irresistible sundae — it helps students delve into ideas they are interested in, things that we wouldn’t normally have time to cover in class.

I am definitely sold on the effectiveness of Guided Inquiry. I love it. I can’t wait to share how our unit went!

Rachelle Johnson

Norman High School

Inquiry is Fluid and Flexible: Part 2

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Yesterday I attempted to discuss this wiggly topic of how GID is not lockstep.  In GID, our job is to guide students to find their own direction for inquiry in this fluid flexible process.

So, what are some key concepts that you can keep in mind as you try to follow the students and stay true to the process.

Think slime not concrete.

Maybe I’ve been hanging out with my 12 year old daughter and her slime too much, but it’s not a bad mental image for the difference between flexibility and rigidity. Slime vs Concrete

Being flexible takes deep understanding of the process. In order to deviate from the norm, we have to fully understand the norm, first.  So knowing the process deeply from a theoretical standpoint and a practical “in the classroom” view helps us to be confident in our variations from that norm, to know what is in bounds and out of bounds. With that knowledge, we can balance trusting the phases of the process, with following the students  as we get to know our students in the process.

Know the phases.

Knowing the process phases and the intention of each phase help

s you to know when we are ready to move on.  The bullet points for each phase are a great checklist for you. The more practice you have guiding the process with students, the more you know how it feels, how students interact, and what they need from you at each phase.

 

Know the research.

The more you understand the research behind GID, the more fluid and flexible you can become, in the moment. Here’s a link to some of the core research on the ISP – remember it is a user-centered design, meaning it came out of a need to better the experience for students who were learning through information in school. It doesn’t come from another industry, but is focused in education and on student learning.

Have an Inquiry Stance (or mindset)

Too much adherence to the plan, you’ll get concrete – and less learning. Inquiry learning requires us to Listen to our students, where they are struggling, where they are becoming inspired, in what direction they are leaning, will help you to “go with the flow” within the process.

In Guided Inquiry Design the learning team designs and plans activities that support students to accomplish each phase.  Having an inquiry stance or mindset is critical to your flexible use of the GID process.  Your inquiry stance is evidenced as you

  • observe students (kid watching),
  • talk with them,
  • ask questions about their ideas,
  • read their journals with an open mind and heart.

The results of those observations and interactions takes the form of shifting and differentiating conversations, groupings, lessons, and directions as needed by students. That’s how we become flexible within the model, by paying attention to how our students are engaging.

Use the Inquiry Tools

The Inquiry Tools inform you of students’ needs. The example I described yesterday shows when you put in the work at each phase, you can be confident of your forward motion. In this case, the students had spent ample time in Open and Immerse and at the end of Explore they each had detailed their own individual ideas for the direction of their research all mapped out. Proper use of the Inquiry Tools will help to guide you and the process in flexible forward motion.

Continually reflect on the work.

Conversations with your colleagues, coaches, and teammates can also help you to think through where you are and what students might need as compared to what was originally planned. Just going through the motions of your plans won’t help you to be flexible within the model, that might even solidify the flexible process into a lock step (concrete) approach. But reflecting on each phase, how the students engaged, and the intention of each phase can drive your flexibility within the process.

With that, I invite you to join us with your reflection here on this blog. That’s what this blog is for. It’s for you to have a space to reflect within our community and with my support!  Because Guided Inquiry is better through reflective practice we created this space for you to practice, try and reflect.  Here we are not looking for perfection, but an inquiry stance, that you’ve tried something and are learning from each attempt!  Through you we can all learn and improve.  Thanks for reading and I hope you’ll give it a go.

Leslie Maniotes, PhD ( leslie@guidedinquirydesign.com )

Author/Professional Developer for Guided Inquiry Design

 

 

Top Posts in 2017! Thanks to all bloggers and readers!

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Hi GID’ers!

As we close out another year of our blog we want to celebrate all the innovative educators who committed to sharing their reflective practice with us and our community! We are making a difference, telling positive stories about our work in schools and helping others to find new ways to innovate and think differently about teaching and learning in their schools.  This year our 52GID blog had almost 4,000 new visitors with over 13,000 page views!

THANK YOU!

In this second year, we had over 30 participants with 100 posts from all over the US, Canada, Australia, Finland, Pakistan, and Croatia! There have been all kinds of cross curricular examples in all areas math, english language arts, arts, psychology, history, science, leadership and more. You’ve had a great year of growth and as each person shares, we all grow in our understanding of the process, its multitude of variations, and how it looks with different learners.  If you’ve missed some posts, relax over your holiday break and take some time to search some topics interesting to you. There’s  a lot to read about here!

SHOUT OUTS

Congratulations to our top bloggers of the year:

Coming in at #3 Marc Crompton Teacher Librarian, St George School, Vancouver, BC

Marc came in third and had more than 100 views on his entry called “The Questions that Drive Me Forward” where he reflected on a topic near and dear to him- connections between Design Thinking and GID.  These two processes are mutually informing and Marc continues this conversation on his own blog later in the year.  Read more from him on his own blog Adventures in Libraryland – here

#2 is Trisha Hutchinson – Teacher Librarian, Monroe Elementary School, Norman, OK

Almost 200 readers enjoyed Trisha’s reflection on moving from Librarian to leader through collaborating with teachers working with Guided Inquiry Design.  Trisha is a librarian in the district in Norman, Oklahoma where over 400 teachers and all librarians have all participated in the GID Institute and the process is becoming the way students learn across the district.  In her post “From Teacher Librarian to Leader” she explores how GID grew across her elementary school building through her leadership and knowledge sharing on the process and through various attempts at different grade levels.

Our #1 blogger for 2017 is Jamie Rentzel – Norman High School Math Teacher, Norman OK

With over 450 views, Jamie Rentzel topped the readership this year with her post on using GID in math.  Her post Guided Inquiry in a High School Math Classroom, Really? was a huge hit with readers.  In this post she connected the need to link students of mathematics to real world applications and GID is just the platform to do that important work. She goes on to explain how she did just that in her unit on  Sequences and Series.

Thanks to all of you for your thoughtful reflections throughout this year of growth, helping our readers expand into new thinking about GID as a means to dig deeper into design thinking, leadership and new ways of approaching content learning for big gains with our students.  Win win win!

We hope you’ll join us for this year’s challenge!  Who know’s where 2018 will take us!

Cheers to all readers and bloggers alike!

Leslie Maniotes, PhD

Author and Consultant for Guided Inquiry Design

 

Greetings from Oklahoma

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Howdy, from the Sooner State! My name is Jamie Johnson and this is my first G.I. blog post! I have been an elementary school librarian in Norman, Oklahoma for sixteen years. I started learning about Guided Inquiry in the spring of 2015 when Leslie Maniotes shared her knowledge and experiences with librarians and gifted resource coordinators from across our school district.  I will be sharing a few strategies that worked for me and our second grade team when we used Guided Inquiry to investigate Presidents and First Ladies last spring.

Jamie Johnson, N.B.C.T., M.L.I.S.

 

 

Keyword Inquiry Log

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In my second post, I shared how Sarah worked with me and Karen to implement concept-based research as well as question-driven inquiry. Now we’ll shift to discuss how students conduct research in the Gather phase.  

I just finished my 4th year working as a school library media specialist, and I was a high school English teacher for 8 years before that. So I have a general idea of how a typical student at my school searches for sources: Google (most likely typing in an entire sentence or question), or at best a cursory glance at a database assigned by a teacher. We are continually striving to make the research phase more meaningful in order to support lifelong learning skills. Librarians crave more time with students in order to introduce them to all the databases available to them. And then databases function differently, requiring time for students to search within them and learn how to find the information they need.

This past February, I read “Doubling Up: authentic vocabulary development through the inquiry process” by Leslie Maniotes and Anita Cellucci published in the February 2017 issue of Teacher Librarian. (A new fiscal year is starting soon; be sure to get your subscription to Teacher Librarian!) When I saw this article and read the first paragraph, one word came to mind: genius! I knew I wanted to implement the keyword log introduced in the article because it just made sense, like the GID model. And I found just the teacher willing to collaborate with me on this project.

Jena Smith teaches the Public Speaking elective at my school, and she is a strong supporter of using library resources with her students. We collaborate frequently throughout the semester. Her students came to the library after selecting topics for their researched argumentative speeches. She created a Google Doc for students to record their topics. Sharing it with me helped me prepare mini-lessons targeted toward their chosen topics. It also taught the students to revise their topics as they began to do research, as some realized their topics weren’t going to work or weren’t quite argumentative in nature.

The rationale for using the keyword log, as presented by Maniotes and Cellucci, is to promote academic vocabulary growth as well as knowledge of information searching strategies. Even if students know what a Boolean operator is, they need to have some knowledge of the vocabulary specific to their topic. Luckily, unlike Google, databases provide keyword searches that will give students suggestions. In EBSCO products, you can search in Subject Terms at the top of the page to learn synonyms.

I mentioned ProQuest’s SIRS Issues Researcher database in my second blog post. It’s super easy to search related subject terms for vocabulary development. The subject terms are listed at the end of each article, which students can click on.

I introduced them to the keyword log and modeled a few sample searches using the topic an at-risk learner chose in order to provide some targeted scaffolding. I added a few columns to the log described in the article just to ensure that students were providing detailed explanations.

As intuitive as I thought this log would be, we encountered a few obstacles during implementation. To start, students aren’t used to slowing down! They wanted to rush through the research process. We met some resistance when we told them they would be recording each search they tried. Of course the whole point was for them to discover that the Gather phase should take time in order to discover the best possible sources of information that would help them develop their researched argumentative speech.

Here are some of the first searches I modeled to the whole class (it’s not perfect; I tried to keep it simple at first):

Below is an excerpt from a reluctant learner’s keyword log. I sat with him as he completed his searches to show him different search strategies. In the first entry, you can see that he realized he wasn’t even searching for one of the main parts of his topic: how do violent video games affect children? His reflection in the second entry shows how I asked him to record his true search behavior, and what we know to be true from research: most searchers do not even scroll down on the first page of results.

I also spent a good deal of time telling them to type more in the results and reflection columns. As the research assignment progresses, students will see how useful the log is the more specific and detailed their responses are.

We discovered that we can really learn about how students conduct research simply by watching them and asking them to search how they would if they were on their own. Start with where they’re at as learners to gather information about their current skills and how they think about research. Then address misconceptions and a lack of skills as you see them.

There is an often overwhelming number of research skills that students can learn: how to search the open web using advanced search strategies and limiters; discovering special interests groups, independent groups, research organizations; picking which database fits their information needs; how to search different databases; how to paraphrase; how to cite. Yikes! But this keyword log provided an organized starting point. My goal is to work with more teachers to use this log at the beginning of their classes and tailor research assignments to target specific research skills instead of trying to teach every skill every time.

Most of the students shared in a survey when we were finished that they had never been taught Boolean search strategies and that the keyword log helped them stay organized. They gained a clearer understanding of how databases work. And remember that the GID model works in any discipline. Information literacy skills should be embedded in each and every course if we want our students to truly learn these lifelong skills.

The key here is that authentic learning does take time. Using databases isn’t always intuitive, and students need practice after direct instruction. Partner up with your school librarian to build these skills into your research units. It’s an investment that pays off in the end.

–Jamie Gregory  @gregorjm   Jamie.gregory@spart5.net

It All Starts With A Question…?

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Greetings from South Carolina! My name is Jamie Gregory, and I am a public high school media specialist in the Upstate of SC at James F. Byrnes High School. I taught high school English for 8 years (including 1 year of French) and just finished my 4th year as a media specialist. I completed my MLIS degree in 2012 from the University of South Carolina, and I was introduced to the GID model during my time there as a graduate student. While I also learned other inquiry models, I found the GID model particularly effective and applicable because it is research-based. Also, Kuhlthau’s ISP model is life-changing. Reading the research on the emotions and behaviors underlying the research and learning processes really changed how I approached the research process while I was still a classroom English teacher.

South Carolina recently adopted new ELA standards, specifically dedicating a strand to inquiry-based learning. Let me tell you, we are doing some great things in SC! Major props to the standards committee for recognizing the proven effectiveness of inquiry-based learning. The state standards document even goes so far as to explicitly state that inquiry-based learning should be incorporated by all classroom teachers, not just ELA:

Can I get an AMEN?! (or whatever you’d like to shout enthusiastically!)

So, given all this change, my district decided to offer a professional development cohort called Inquiry in the Classroom. When the head of professional development asked for volunteers to lead it, I knew I wanted to jump in so I could also promote the role of the media specialist in inquiry-based learning.

I led Inquiry in the Classroom, a professional development cohort of 18 English, Social Studies, Science, and special education teachers grades 9-12, from January to May of 2017. We met once per month, and I knew I wanted to share the GID model with these teachers. I also knew that I wanted to have teachers begin to implement aspects of inquiry-based learning throughout the semester so that we could have brainstorming sessions at our meetings to share successes and opportunities for improvement.

My posts this week are going to feature my collaborations with 3 English teachers at my school: Sarah Plant, Jena Smith, and Michael Jett. They are truly awesome educators and I can’t thank them enough for working with me this past year.

I spent a lot of time during the cohort sharing resources about the importance of questioning. (I also highly recommend the book Cultivating Curiosity by Wendy Ostroff!) Meeting students in the Third Space so they can choose topics and ideas that interest them and affect them personally is so important, and educators can help them discover new topics that students didn’t even know they wanted to learn more about! By the time we get our students in grade 10, some students have already “gotten by” with being passive learners. So when they are asked to be curious, ask questions, and engage in real-world issues, they truly aren’t sure what that looks like.

But don’t worry, we always have a few tricks up our sleeves!

Idea #1!  One activity for creating questions comes from a very effective professional book, Coteaching Reading Comprehension Strategies in Secondary School Libraries: maximizing your impact by Judi Moreillon. Chapters are organized by 7 strategies, and I focused on the chapter titled Questioning. Visit the ALA.org website to see the online extras available for this book! (Trust me, there is so much good stuff here you will feel overwhelmed by what to try first!) http://www.alaeditions.org/web-extra-coteaching-reading-comprehension-strategies-secondary-school-libraries

 

In our March cohort meeting, I had the teachers watch a brief video about coal mining today.

I chose this particular video as an example to use with students in a science classroom because information literacy skills can be embedded along with science content knowledge (have students question the source of this video! Challenge them to find a video from an opposite bias!).  In order to model how you might use the above handout in the classroom during the Open and Immerse stages, as a cohort we brainstormed some questions we thought we had about coal mining today before watching the video. Then while we watched the video, each person wrote down questions. After the video, we wrote even more questions after sharing! This activity works really well to show students the recursive nature of questioning and learning. Then the bottom of this handout addresses metacognitive skills as well as information literacy skills! So wonderful!

Idea #2! For middle and high schoolers, there are a number of wonderful nonfiction series to help students research argumentative topics. We particularly like At Issue, Critical World Issues, Current Controversies, Opposing Viewpoints, and Thinking Critically. Some of these series provide questions as chapter titles, which we used with some classes. Some databases like SIRS Issues Researcher also provide questions related to various topics which can be used for scaffolding. Partner up with your media specialist to learn what resources you already have in your school library! These resources can effectively be used during the Open and Immerse stages, particularly if you have your media specialist set up a gallery walk with stations.

In this screenshot, SIRS Issues Researcher (a ProQuest product) suggests various subtopics related to Military Ethics and represents those subtopics by questions!

In this screenshot, you can see how SIRS Issues Researcher provides a few critical thinking questions when students click on a topic. Don’t miss the essential question in the background!

I will feature ideas and student work from Sarah Plant and my library service learners in tomorrow’s post to continue the discussion about questioning, and I will include how we focused on developing concept-based research assignments. Stay tuned!

-Jamie Gregory @gregorjm jamie.gregory@spart5.net

Step One of Implementing GID

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Guided Inquiry is a concept that I was first introduced to last year.  Our amazing librarian Jenny Lussier arranged for first grade teacher Jessica Loffredo and myself, Carole Sibiskie, to attend the GID Institute.  It was an absolute privilege to be able to participate in the CISSL Summer Institute at Rutgers University last summer.   As someone who has engaged in Project Based Learning for over a decade, it was a curious process to see where GID and PBL overlapped and where they differed.  Through the institute, our team worked on a Social Studies unit to implement with a multi-age first and second grade classroom.  

Jessica Loffredo, Leslie Maniotes, Jenny Lussier, Carole Sibiskie, and Carol Kuhlthau at GID Institute Summer 2016

The Family Heritage unit is one that we have covered in the past, but at the institute we were able to “redesign” with a collaborative inquiry focus.   Our team made changes to fit the unit into the design template and to strengthen the framework.  We extended opportunities for the open.  It was clear that one area that needed to be lengthened was the process of immersion for the students in the content.  The largest change came in adding the explore area.  Prior to our introduction to Guided Inquiry Design, this was an area that was missing in the process. Time was added for the children to develop their own areas of personal interest in a much more meaningful and purposeful manner.  The GID Framework encouraged us to also dig deeper into the phases of identify, gather, create, share, and evaluate. There was so much more to consider than in the past.

The reality of implementing the plan hit during the school year with many celebrations and many challenges.  The biggest challenge was to find time to collaborate.  Snippets of time were found during the day, and there was electronic communication, but it is an effort to find extended amounts of common time.  Also, as the classroom teacher, it is very easy to get caught up in the moment and forget to reach out to connect.  We made sure to connect for the important aspects, even though we weren’t always able to be with the kids at the same time.  Additionally, several of the experiences and opportunities moved from open to immerse and vice versa due to time constraints,  connections to other curricular areas, and the lack of large chunks of time to give undivided attention to this work.  It wasn’t exactly the way we laid the plan out on paper, but it worked nonetheless.

The highlights were the moments with the students fully engaged in the process, and they were many!  When we finally found the large block of time to integrate “the open”, a simulated Ellis Island experience in the classroom, the children had already developed a lot of background information related to Ellis Island through read-alouds.  This actually made the experience more relevant to the students as they cheered, “We are at Ellis Island!” upon entering the classroom.  When the first student was marked with chalk, they exclaimed, “Oh, no he is sick.  He might not be let into the country.”  So it seems we had a “soft open”, that enriched the actual open!

One of the most powerful explore areas arose as the students planned a school assembly share.   They decided to represent each of their family heritages through folk music and choreographed invented folk dances.  YouTube was used to select the “just right” songs using democratic practice.  There were many whole class conversations about how music and dance impact a culture and vice versa.  Students studied related flags, texts, and maps as they planned this share.  Students greeted the audience in their “native” languages and danced for each of their countries of origin around the tree they decided to create using photos to represent ancestors on the bottom and generations at the top.  Several of the children had more than ten countries of origin!

Students also worked with resident artist Sally Rogers to write and create a family heritage song and old fashioned cranky to illustrate their song.  The students decided the song would be about immigration.  This process helped them move from the explore to identify phase as they collaborated on this project and found their personal interests in different areas.  Students also had old photos of ancestors which they wrote an invented realistic fiction story which they produced on Seesaw to share with classmates and their families. Their research and information from read aloud texts came through loud and clear in these pieces.

Individual research occurred with much support from families to provide needed background information. The students learned about geography, languages, music, dance, genealogy, history, foods, and numerous other aspects of culture.  Additionally, respect was developed for the diversity and variety of cultures including the 19 countries of origin for these children!

Each student developed an independent project to share their family heritage with the class.  Students used “passports” to reflect upon the learning in the unit.  The students were more driven and clear with their path than prior years. The GID process enabled us to build an inquiry stance where all of our community members developed a more purposeful mindset.  This first attempt at Guided Inquiry Design was far from perfect.  We are building on this experience and are currently rolling out another GID inspired STEAM unit.  Stay tuned…

Carole Sibiskie

John Lyman School

Regional School District 13

Connecticut

Introducing: Marc Crompton

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Well… reintroducing, really!  I’m a Teacher Librarian at St George’s School in Vancouver, BC.  That’s right, the same school as the divine Curious St George!  While she’s at our Jr School (grades 1-7), I see the boys when they come up the street to our Sr School.  Yes, I used the word “boys” purposely as we are a single-gender (boys) school.  You might be interested in my posts (1,2,3) from last year where I talked about work with a grade 10 Social Studies Class and how I look at other tools as they work in conjunction with GID, such as NSRF’s protocols.

To put things in context, I’ve been at St George’s School for 25 years.  I was likely hired, in part, because I’d played rugby in high school, but I was brought on as a music teacher and have yet to spend a day on the rugby pitch.  In 2009, some different opportunities opened up at the school that I thought that I’d try my hand at.  I started leading an educational technology cohort of teachers and took on a very “part-time and temporary” role as our school librarian.  Since then, I’ve completed my MLIS at San Jose State and am permanent and very full time…  In the past year, I’ve also taken on the creation and administration of a grade 10 STEM program.  Through this time, I’ve written a number of articles for Teacher Librarian magazine, co-authored a book on Collection Development with Dr David Loertscher and, most recently and pertinently, have contributed chapters to Leslie’s High School edition of the GID book series.  I also have a personal blog that I’m recently not contributing much to, but if you’re more interested in the kinds of things that I think about, you could head over to Adventures in Libraryland.
My journey in GID started in a meaningful way, when Leslie was kind enough to organize a trip to Boston for myself, Curious St George and two of our Sr School Social Studies teachers to check out two schools who were deeply embeded in the ways of GID.  The teachers and librarians at Lexington and Westborough High Schools were amazing hosts and we had a chance to talk in depth with students and teachers about their experiences with GID in conjunction with some great chats with Leslie to help put it all in perspective.  From there, we came back to Vancouver and started implementing the model and spreading the gospel.  Since then, I’ve worked with teachers at our Sr School in Social Studies, English, Computer Science, and Languages to design and implement GID units.  Some were successful and some were less so, but all engaged students in meaningful ways and made research relevant.

In my own teaching, I’ve been looking at instructional design models that focus around building or making physical manifestations of student learning.  My current STEM cohort works most overtly with a Design Thinking model that has come out of Stanford’s dSchool.  This is not to say that I’ve abandoned GID however.  My experience and knowledge of the GID model has informed everything that I do within the Design Thinking model.  I actually see a strong correlation between the two models and I think that aspects of GID truly make Design Thinking, when used as instructional design, much more effective.

In a nutshell, the emphasis in Design Thinking is in the creating a solution to a problem.  In many ways, it is akin to Problem Based Learning.  What GID brings to the process is the stronger research structure and documentation of thinking.  While every one of my students thinks in terms of the Design Thinking model and are adept at adapting that model to a variety of situations, they are also using the tools of GID in their Inquiry Journals (blogs), and how they approach their Immerse and Explore phases.

My next posts will look at this relationship between GID and my students’ use of Design Thinking.  Likely, my last post will look at our current process and investigate how explicit use of GID concepts will allow us to improve the work that they are doing in a few key ways.  I hope that you’ll enjoy reading and I encourage you to push back and challenge me as we go.  I don’t pretend to have all the answers, and I likely have even fewer than I think I do!

 

Marc Crompton

 

And the Results Are In!

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I did my first guided inquiry project this fall with two of my freshman ELA classes.  The general topic was on civil rights–connecting the movement of the 1960s to the civil rights climate in society today.  Partly due to it being my first GID project, we did not assign a final paper, project, or presentation based on the research, which on the one hand seemed to make things a little easier on me, and on the other hand felt a bit like cheating.  My students were confused, too.  Although we had a good vision for the project, a lot of it was planned as we went along since I was also learning as we went along, and we never planned a final product assignment.  My teacher librarian helped me understand that with GID, that was an acceptable option.

I have always claimed to be someone who appreciated the journey more than the destination and the process more than the product, but it seems different when you are responsible for teaching, although it shouldn’t.  One of the things I discovered during this guided inquiry is that I like to see what my students “got.”  “What did they get out of it? Did they get something? What did they get?”  I am curious.  I want to know.  I want to see it, even if I don’t always want to grade it.

At the end of the project, I had no regrets about not having assigned a traditional paper or presentation, except for the fact that I didn’t feel like I saw enough of what they got.  On the other hand, I didn’t exactly put a lot of time into reading their research notecards, either!  We did ask the students to complete a final reflection in writing.  It’s just that for me, there wasn’t enough about what they learned, content-wise, in their reflections.

That being said, I am definitely satisfied enough to do this project again in a similar way.  I am looking forward to working with our teacher librarian, Anita Cellucci, again because I know that her guidance will help me evaluate, adjust, and fine-tune the process.  I am also hoping to come across some other good ideas for guided inquiry projects.  I am planning to read Leslie’s high school edition of Guided Inquiry Design in Action to help inspire me.  

Meanwhile, here are some of the noteworthy reflections from the students who were the founding participants of our civil rights GID project.   

How did what you found in your research help you understand what is going on today?

  • It made me realize that although we believe that segregation and inequality are no longer an issue, it still appears in many ways. Seeing the similarities in many of the deaths and protests that occur now, and that did occur in the past demonstrates that the United State’s hasn’t evolved as much as we thought.
  • I found a lot of information about the current rights for LGBT members. It made me think about how blacks, women, minorities used to be discriminated against and now the world is trying to create equal rights for lesbians, gay, bisexuals, and transgendered people.
  • I researched in the areas of black power in the time of the 1960’s and I have studied how that movement has shifted into the U.S. today in the form of #BlackLivesMatter. The use of technology allows protesters today to spread their powerful words for equality.

How did knowing that there was no paper to write affect how you felt about your research?

  • It helped me focus more on the research and instead of thinking about making paragraphs it helped me focus more on the overall understanding of the inquiry project, and answering the topic question. Knowing that there was no paper to write helped me focus on understanding the main idea.
  • It made me a little less stressed and allowed me to look at a more general view of the topic as well as allowed me to develop a lot more ideas and opinions about the topic rather than just focusing on one.
  • Well, instead of really directing my research to a certain topic and narrowing down the different branches of civil rights, I kept my research broad and I was able to learn a lot more than I would have if there was a paper at the end.

Describe how you felt about working on this inquiry project a) when you first started, b) as you were gathering information and c) as you discussed your research with your classmates.  

  • When I first started this inquiry project I was a bit confused, I didn’t really fully understand the question. While I was gathering information I was a bit frustrated because at first I didn’t know if there was a final product or not but as soon as I learned that there wasn’t, the researching became a lot easier. At the end of the project, I felt that I had learned quite a bit about civil rights and the Black Lives Matter movement and I felt that I had done a good job with the research.
  • While discussing my research with my classmates, I realized that I had very much enjoyed completing so much research on different components of the large topic of civil rights. I have gained so much more knowledge surrounding the topic and can say that overall I liked and appreciated this inquiry project.
  • As I discussed my research with my classmates, it helped a lot because I got to hear what other people did with the project, and sharing my ideas and having Mrs. Cellucci ask me questions about what I found helped my understanding of what I found a little better.

Thanks for reading!  –Susan Smith

High School ELA Civil Rights GID

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I really didn’t mean to leave the last blog as a cliffhanger.  But on that note, to pick up the story, we left our hero taking the plunge into a Guided Inquiry Design project on civil rights…and no worries, we all lived happily ever after.  

So the notorious science project from 2015 was an aberration, really, in a school which had been successfully using Guided Inquiry Design in several disciplines for a couple of years already.  One reason that the freshman reaction to that particular science inquiry was so loud is because almost every freshman in the school was doing it at the same time.  That, and a variety of other non-favorable guided inquiry design circumstances combined for a kind of perfect storm.  The silver lining, though, for me anyway, was that it really prompted me to investigate Guided Inquiry Design and then, more importantly, to partner with our extremely accomplished teacher librarian for tons of help and guidance with the whole project.  

Even without knowing the particulars of Guided Inquiry Design, a guided inquiry project on civil rights appealed to me as something that would kill a lot of birds with one stone.  I wouldn’t have to worry about appearing to have an “agenda” on social and political issues, I wouldn’t have to review and gather the right sources, and my students could come to their own conclusions based on their own research.  Plus, I could feel like my students were getting exposed to important information about the past and about our world today.  Such a project would satisfy an ideal of creating authentic assignments, it would connect literature with life, it would satisfy a research requirement, it would promote intellectual curiosity, it would just about walk the dog and build strong bodies 12 ways.  Still, there was a lot to think about and plan out beforehand, so I was fortunate to have our teacher librarian expert to walk and sometimes push me through it.  

It was my first Guided Inquiry project.  It was a lot.  I guess those are my disclaimers.  

I learned a lot.  I will do it again.  I guess those are my claimers.  

I’m not going to lie.  There were times when my teacher librarian partner looked at me like I had two heads (I wanted to let the kids use social media for research, somehow), and I know there were times I thought she had three heads—and I couldn’t understand any of them (She wanted to just give the kids a bunch of magazines and newspapers to look through! And forget about the differences between open, explore, and immerse or the five kinds of learning rubric—what are you talking about?).  But, we were successful in the end, and sometimes we even still speak to each other when we can’t avoid it (kidding!).  

We started with the idea or the prompt.  I wanted students to compare the original Civil Rights Movement to the things going on today.  I had even seen some articles with titles like “Are We Having a Second Civil Rights Movement?” so I wondered if they could research that question and support or deny it.  Anita and I talked through some of my thinking and she helped me come up with the essential question: what are the similarities between the time of the original Civil Rights Movement and today, and how can we use this information to understand the climate in the U.S. today?

One of my favorite pieces of the project was one of the early stages. Umm… yes, it was definitely one of those early stages.  We created stations. One station had several photos of then and now (like a 60s protest photo and a picture of Colin Kaepernick).  One had an article from The Atlantic relating to racism and the presidential election.  The third station had a great video (that I found on Facebook) about the women who founded the Black Lives Matter movement.  The next day was even better!  In planning, Anita had watched me hem, haw, argue, and stress out for about 20 minutes straight, and then she decided that we should gather up a bunch of current magazines and newspapers from right there in the library where we stood, and have the students go through them in search of items related to civil rights.  I was incredulous.  I never thought they would just find things if we didn’t already know what was in there, but I went along with it, with absolutely no faith.  Luckily, Anita plowed on, because I  ended up loving it.  My honors students found a bunch of relevant articles and pieces.  The movie Loving was out (about an interracial couple who wanted to get married, which was against the law, and went to court), there was an article about local discrimination in housing, an article about immigration, and a bunch of other great things that I can’t remember.  I just remember that I was amazed at how wrong I was, and excited for all the topics the students seemed to be engaged in.  There was even something just pretty cool about seeing students reading newspapers.  None of the groups ran out of civil rights connections, and the sharing afterwards helped everyone to see how many different topics were included under the idea of civil rights today.  Check, check.  

My college preparatory level students who were doing the same project did not do as well with the newspapers and magazines, interestingly.  One kid got lost in the paper, and he and several others seemed to forget what we were looking for.  When we shared, he talked about what he had found interesting in the obituaries.  Although the students themselves were content, we decided to give this class one more day with that early stage of the process.  It’s noteworthy that these projects can be fluid and adapted for the students’ needs.  These guys needed a little more, so we found four videos and did another station session.  One video was the part of the Eyes on the Prize documentary that featured the story of Emmett Till.  One video was from an episode of What Would You Do? that featured a woman being denied service at a bakery for wearing a Muslim headscarf.  One video was about a transgendered teen who was an activist.  The final video addressed the Dakota pipeline protests.  Adding an extra day with some pre-selected content made a big difference for this class, I think.

Although there were other aspects of the project that I really appreciated, like how easy it was to read students’ notecards in Noodle Tools, I think those introductory sessions were the highlight for me.  I even used the same sort of station format for a lesson with my senior film class.

I could certainly say more about the project in its various stages, but I’m so long winded, and I have said the things that seem most important to me.   Definitely not a cliffhanger–I will try to talk about the results of our project in the next post.  

Susan Smith