Post 3: My Grade 7 (Year 8) Science Class

I wasn't thinking about using my class today as a topic for my writing exercise but the class went so well that I changed my mind.  The grade 7s have been working on a unit about the periodic table and were divided into pair groupings to complete a research project on one particular element.  Below is the information from their task sheet. (This is not included in my word count!)

Title: The Elemental Quest

Introduction:

In this project research we will embark on an exciting journey into the heart of chemistry and

its profound impact on our world. In this project, we will look into the essential building blocks

of matter: the elements of the periodic table. But we're not just exploring their scientific

significance; we're delving deeper into the catastrophic consequences that could ensue if

these elements were to vanish from our existence.

Each of your groups will embark on a research quest, assigned to investigate the importance

of a specific element from the periodic table. You'll uncover its indispensable role in various

aspects of our lives, from industry to medicine, agriculture to technology. But here's the twist:

you'll also examine the potential devastation that would unfold if this element were to

suddenly disappear from our planet.

Imagine a world without oxygen, carbon, or even something as seemingly inconspicuous as

iodine. The repercussions would be far-reaching and severe, impacting everything from the

air we breathe to the food we eat, the devices we use, and the medicines that keep us

healthy.

Through this project, you'll not only deepen your understanding of chemistry but also

cultivate a sense of responsibility towards preserving these fundamental elements. You'll

discern why it's imperative to safeguard them for future generations and advocate for their

conservation.

Get ready to unlock the secrets of the periodic table and discover the power it holds over our

past, present, and future. 

Welcome to the Elemental Quest!

Your research product could take any of the following forms:

● A story (biography or autobiography) about the element

● A children’s book about the Element

● Powerpoint presentation about the element(12-15 slides)

● The element webpage or Movie

● A poem or song about the element

● An element case file or Poster

● Collage/picture book with captions or scrapbook of element

● Interview video (Student/Scientist, Journalist/Researcher, Parent/Child, etc., )

My role in this was to take the students through the process of setting up their Works Cited List (WCL) and to introduce the research guide and the print books available from the library.  

 As I demonstrated in my account, one person in each pair group set up a WCL using Noodletools and then shared it with their teacher, their partner, and me.  Next, I introduced the libguide for the project , which acted as a jumping off point for their research.  The guide contains links to various tools such as the library database and noodletools; slide presentations on using noodletools, in-text referencing and the referencing of images according to MLA.  There is also a tab for databases, three in all.  I went through each one briefly reminding the class how to use them.  Finally there is a tab for web links.  (All of this is available by clicking on the link above.)

I am returning to the class next week to assist students, mainly with the referencing.

(I am not entirely happy with this description so I will probably edit it!)

 As I said in my previous post, I was involved in a writing project a number of years ago.  Today I decided to find those blog entries and read some of them.  One of them is my jumping off point for today's post:  https://kitandcaboodal.blogspot.com/2015/03/post-6-round-2-of-28daysofwriting.html.

Bear in mind that the post was written over 9 years ago, when you read what I have to say today.  I came up with a number of suggestions to improve the research stills of our students and reading over them, I realise that we have made little progress.  

First of all, I recognised that we need to work with primary students to improve their skills (and those of their teachers) so that they are prepared when they move up to secondary.  I recognise that I have partially succeeded in achieving this goal even though I may not feel that I have progressed far with it.  The grade 5s (year 6 in the UK system), spend part of their year preparing a topic for their exhibition in early May, and I work with them.  

This year the students accomplished the following:

1. Learned how a browser and a search engine work in order to better understand how to phrase our keyword searches.

2. Learned how to use some of the google operators, such as: the site operator [site:]; the range operator [air flights 1950..2020]; how to find definitions using [define:]; and how to search for particular file types [filetype:pdf]

3. Became familiar with keywords which would help them find statistical information about their topic

We also did some work on how to verify that a website/source was reliable and how to find images, charts, and graphs.

Having written this, I don't feel that we've done too badly!

(301 words)

7 Draft Entries and Nothing to Show for Them!

 The last 7 draft entries in my blog haven't been finished.  Realising this, reminded me of a writing project I got involved in about 6 or 7 years ago.  The idea was to write 200+ words a day, every day.  I can't remember how long we planned to do this but I managed it for a month at least.  I have several blogs so the results of this 200+ challenge must be somewhere.  However, reading them isn't the point of this entry, which I plan on finishing!  It is to set a similar challenge to anyone who is interested.  I do know that the more I write, the more I write, if you follow that.  Not only do I start to write longer pieces but they get better.  (Thank goodness, my inner voice is saying!).   

Here is what I suggest.  Commit to write 150+ words on your life as a librarian and post it on a blog, the link to which you can share in this Facebook group.  Commit to it for at least 4 days out of 7, more if you can.  Read the blogs of others and perhaps have your blog entry be a response to someone else's from time to time.

Let's start a conversation!

(208 words! Now that wasn't hard!)

A Rose by any other name…would still be a library. Or would it?

Groan!  Another article about another area of the world, this time my home base of Canada, where libraries are being reimagined and pushed into a corner; and the librarians quietly confined to obscurity.  In this article, the library has become the ‘Curiosity Space’.  I don’t know whether to vomit or…well, what?  

https://www.winnipegfreepress.com/breakingnews/2022/12/31/its-not-a-school-library-its-a-curiosity-space

Were the school libraries I have overseen, curated, loved and nurtured over the years not full of curious children and young adults, learning about the world around and within?  I shout emphatically, ‘yes, they were’!  Did these libraries not evolve over the years to meet the needs of their users?  Again, I shout, “Yes, they did!”

Do I sound frustrated?  

I think that is an emphatic "Yes," shouted to the indifferent universe!

Why My Students Use Wikipedia

 Wikipedia has become the bugbear of teachers at many schools when it comes to student use of the internet for research.  When I started at my present school in 2009, it was obvious that my students were unlikely to give up using Wikipedia simply because we wanted them to.  The solution, I decided, was to convince them that they should not reference it and that it should only be used as a jumping off point in their research.  On our libguides, I made sure that students always received the following advice:

School Policy on Wikipedia:  Read for background but do not cite!

Rule No. 1:  Use Wikipedia as a starting point for your research, but don't cite it unless you can exhaustively demonstrate that it is the only authoritative source on a particular issue.

Unfortunately, a few students decided that the policy meant that they could use the information from Wikipedia but that they didn’t need to reference it.  Thus we added rule 2 and 3:

Rule No. 2:  Re: Rule No. 1:  That doesn't mean that you should use the information from Wikipedia anyway and just not cite it.  It means that you should find other research sources.  Encyclopedias are only meant as starting points!  For example, you could find the bibliography in the Wikipedia article and look at the sources that the author of the article used.  You could also look to see if there is a list of links.  Check those out as well.

Rule No. 3:  If you are unsure, ask your teacher or librarian!

Over the years I have become a more sophisticated user of Wikipedia.  Furthermore, I have carried out my own research into Wikipedia and its use in academic research.  I can’t say in what order any of this happened.  However, I have recently come across a number of university libguides which include information and videos on the use of Wikipedia for research; and I have used them with my senior students.

Below is an example of a video from the University of New Brunswick in Canada

 

I have also taken on board some of my own observations to improve how I carry out research.  Initially, I read an article for background and then checked out the references and the links.  Later, I realised that the articles often gave me search terms I could use in furthering my search for information sources.  Finally, it wasn’t till I discovered Mike Canfield and SIFT, and later the Civil Online Reasoning course from Stanford that I realised Wikipedia’s value in fact checking sources.  

And now for the ‘more’. We tell our students not to use Wikipedia and yet many teachers seem happy to accept websites which might be judged as equally or more dubious. From a recent history assignment, I found the following:

1. https://www.history.co.uk/ :  a website originating in the United States and created by the Arts and Entertainment Network

2. https://www.biography.com/ :  also from the Arts and Entertainment Network

3. https://www.ducksters.com/ :  Little detail is given on the authors of the information on this website.  In their defence they do give a works cited list for some of the articles.  However, in the geography section the information source for Taiwan is over 10 years old. 

There are many websites, which student researchers come across which fall into the same category as those above. I have started to include a list of such websites on our libguides (see example below). I am hoping that teachers will also include them on the task sheets they prepare for any research assignment.

MYP and Research Skills

 A few weeks ago I facilitated a discussion on zoom about research skills in the MYP.  Though I had hoped for co-presenters, no-one stepped forward so much of the hour was taken up with me talking about what my IT integrationist colleague and I have started to do at our school and our future plans.  This is meant as an introduction to the recording of that session.

I have been working somewhat haphazardly over the last few years on teaching research skills to my MYP students and in developing a scope and sequence and learner outcomes for some of these skills.  I say haphazardly because, despite being a fairly effective researcher, it has taken me some time to come to an understanding of what skills beginners require, how to teach them and how to go about scaffolding those skills over a number of years so that students eventually develop into confident, effective researchers.

The covid pandemic lockdowns gave me an opportunity to step back from the hurly-burly of school life and take a good look at my practice and the needs of my students.  First, I came to the conclusion that I needed to upskill.  I needed to be better than my students and I also needed to be able to confidently meet them where they’re at.  

I know that we would all like our students to use our databases as the first ‘go to place’ in their research but that usually doesn’t happen.  Truthfully, it is rare that I start there either.  They are google and Wikipedia users first, a fact I had to learn to work with.  I was an adequate user of google but that wasn’t good enough so I looked first on their site for any courses or tips they might offer and from there was led to the edX courses on Power Searching and Advanced Power Searching of Google.  This was a turning point for me.  Not only did I increase my skill level but I learned how to better strategise my searches.  I learned the value of google scholar and google books in searching for sources for my diploma students and now encourage them to start there before diving into JSTOR and other databases we have access to.  I discovered the value of having an account in Researchgate so that I could request free PDFs of articles from their authors.  I learned how to dig around for PDFs of articles which I was unable to access through our resources, by hunting through the various versions of an article in google scholar.  The fact is I learn more with every search I do.  

And what about Wikipedia?  More about that in a later blog.

Now how to go about teaching some of this to students!  After a number of false starts and less than successful tries with grade 9s (see earlier blog posts for reflection on my failure) I came to the obvious conclusion, though not obvious to me initially, that I had to start at the beginning.  In this case that was at the beginning of MYP, and that was grade 6 and not grade 9.  That isn’t to say that I wasn’t going to work on certain research skills with other grades but that I was going to start to create a scope and sequence for research with grade 6 and refine it throughout the year by continuing to work on those skills in various subject areas.  Then I would move with them into grade 7, further developing what they needed to know there.

But what did they need to know and what would be classified as research skills?  This is where my collaboration with the IT Integrationist became so invaluable.  He was new to our school and as we started chatting I realised that he was having one of the same problems I had encountered when I started - not being able to get invited into the classes.  I invited him to come into a science class with me when I was working with them on research in forensics.  And to paraphrase Bogart, this was the beginning of a beautiful ‘collaboration’!

In one of our post-mortem sessions, we asked the question: what do students need to know to be successful in this project.  We recognised that there may be other skills in other projects, but this was our starting point.   Over the course of a number of discussions we decided on the following:

1. Organisation (and Planning)

2. Questions and Questioning

3. Source literacy

4. Searching/Researching

5. Source evaluation

6. Note taking 

7. Referencing and academic integrity 

In the meanwhile, I had started on a list of learner outcomes for search engine skills which should be achieved by the end of grade 10; and a scope and sequence for academic integrity and referencing, and how that would be integrated into the units through grades 6 to 10.  Both are as yet unfinished but we hope to complete them at an upcoming curriculum writing session.  That will just leave us with the other areas of research skills for next year.

For all of this to work, we recognised that one or two people trying to integrate these skills and reinforce them throughout the curriculum just wasn’t going to work!  We had to get the teachers involved to the point where they could and would take ownership of part of it.  Since this would require that many of them upskill in some areas, we decided to survey them to assess where the training was needed.  Now that we have the results, we can plan how to go ahead with our training sessions during pre-planning and throughout the upcoming school year.

So here we are.  We have a plan for implementation; we have a better understanding of what teachers and students require; we are continuing to write learner outcomes and a scope and sequence for research and referencing; and until the units of study are changed, we know in what units we will teach various skills in grade 6 to 8.

For a copy of the slide presentation, and other documents which accompanied the original zoom discussion, please contact the author through the comments section with your email address or via the Facebook group IB Librarians.  

Resources for Reflective Practice

This is an excellent resource from Cambridge Libraries.

 Cambridge Libraries Reflective Practice Toolkit

All about pre-mortems and worksheets to boot!

Pre-Mortem