We're Number Two! School Library Outreach

SUMMARY
Twelve ways to expand the reach of the school library beyond its walls. A great library program requires that little bit more in order to thrive, not merely survive.

On the Periphery?

Let's face it. School libraries are not central to the focus of most administrators, staff, parents, and students. Sports teams, core subjects, and report cards dominate school life. The library is outside this charmed circled.

However, being in charge of the school library has always reminded me of the Avis car rental commercial of a few years ago: "When you're Number Two, you have to try harder."

Whether you like it or not, you will never promote your library program and make yourself indispensible to school life unless you "get out there" with a strong library outreach.  Create a regular calendar of diverse events. Above all, partner with staff, students, parents, and administrators to do this. Such co-option strengthens client buy-in to your goals and deepens your own commitment to school-wide spirit and excellence.

Make It Always Time for the School Library
Here then are twelve ways to expand "library consciousness" throughout your school. You don't have to do all twelve, but before you complain that a school-librarian's day is full enough, consider how important it is to go that one step further to thrive, not just survive.

1. Art Show
Arrange an art space in your library and invite the visual art department to have monthly shows of student creations. At least once a year exhibit staff or community work and have students curate it. Treat the space like a proper art gallery with a catalogue, signage, and red dots!

2. Essay Prize
This is a traditional one. Seek help and funds to create an annual essay prize in honour of a former alumnus, librarian, teacher etc. Keep the essay subject and rules simple each year but publicize it throughout the year. Ask for a teacher committee to judge the essays and secure a place on prize day or graduation to present the award(s). Publish winner(s) and runners-up in the library blog or newsletter.  

3. Formal Debate
Challenge the English department to organize a formal debate on a literary or social issue. Hold the debate in the library at a public time for staff, students, and parents. Use the trappings of debates, including the grand entrance of teams, timers and  bells, gavels, and heckling from  the audience. Record the teams and speaker of the house for each debate over the years in a formal photo for display.

4. New Books Party
Our library held one of these in the Fall, Winter, and Spring to celebrate the new books we had bought. Each party included tea and cake and had a seasonal decor. We secured a few prizes from local businesses to raffle off to defray expenses. Everyone got a bookmark with new titles to take home.

5. Parents' Night
Library staff are often at loose ends on Parents' Nights and Information Evenings. Somehow we have to get  parents into the school library on these occasions. Short of being the coat check or coffee bar, advertise a new display, give a short talk about your program, provide a musical interlude through the overworked music department. These are times to show yourself, not hide or go home. Your staff are watching to see if you are a full member of the team

6. Board Games
 A Toronto magnet for the young is a bistro called Snakes and Lattes. Here people come to play board games and talk with friends. A small cover charge is taken and experts roam to help people learn rules quickly and develop strategy. Now many libraries "allow" games like chess or video games during the day but how about a charity event in your library after school where staff and students bring and play new and old board games. Organize a team of experts who will also get the message out. Charge a small entrance fee (pay as you can) and arrange for a bake sale and coffee table. All funds go to a designated charity.

7. Homework Club
If you haven't got one of these already, shame. The library is the perfect place to do homework and get help from formal and informal mentors. Teacher-librarians I know have taken the lead in offering this as a valuable service to staff and students. Ask for help though. You can't do this alone. If you want to grow this service keep records of attendees and have a (rising?) bar graph on display.


8. Extra-Curricular Club
Everyone has a library club or a book club. But until the librarian joins or runs a club outside the library (e.g. sports, drama, computer etc.) he or she will be perceived as not fully participating in the extra-curricular life of the school. This is a great way to get to know your students in a very different way, and they you. I remember one member of my drama club saying after a rehearsal: "Gee Sir, I never knew you were a teacher too!"

9. Info-Tech Talks
This outreach is to establish your tech credentials with staff and students. Work with computer studies personnel to present a series of talks on recent tech subjects. Widen your audience to include the whole school community, including parents. Select relevant subjects (e.g., social networking, the impact of e-books). Combine the expertise of other speakers when available. Think of this as your local TED Talks. In fact, if your strapped for ideas, gather around the screen and watch TED as a community. Then talk about it.

10. Golf Tournament
Get the kids to help plan an indoor (winter break?) putting tournament on your library floor. Holes can be creative uses of library shelves, tables, and other furniture, as well as built pieces such as slight ramps and dogleg corners from the wood technology department. Search the web for ideas about layouts.


11. Twinning Library
Work with administration and staff to approach a school library in another country. Secure SKYPE access or other communications system and plan a unit with a classroom teacher whereby students in both countries share research done in the library or on the Net. Use wikis and blogs to share the inquiry process and its results. Get mileage for this time intensive project in school newsletters and Board of Education website

12. Field Trip
Partner with the history, geography. or social studies teacher and plan a trip for his/her class to a community archives facility for a curriculum-based research activity. Take lots of photos to display with student work in the library.

The school library and its staff are a treasured resource. Make time to celebrate its curricular and extra-curricular life with all its partners.

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Learning Commons Episode 8: Designing the School Library as a Garden

SUMMARY: To explore learning and change, the idea of the school library as a formal garden is cultivated. A model floor plan that is adaptable by many school library spaces is presented, designed to apply models of inquiry and the concept of the learning commons.


What's in a Name?

Many in the school library profession have agonized over the name we should give to the space we work in: school library, information centre, school library information centre, library media centre, resource centre, or just plain library. The belief is that the name should reflect all that happens in the space and the person making it happen— teacher-librarian, library media specialist, school librarian etc.

I am not too worried any more about such terms but more interested in how the space/vocation nurtures  learning and change. As I continue to use this blog to plant the ideas of models of inquiry and the learning commons developed in Together for Learning (OSLA, 2009), I want to cultivate the idea of the school library as garden and the school librarian as gardener.

The Formal Garden

Chahar Bagh Islamic Garden Garden Design

Now bear with me. Here's my fanciful argument. In (re)designing a school library space, we need a model that is both traditional and innovative. One that is organic, dynamic, and wholistic. We could consider one of the oldest organizing maps: the formal garden. 

A formal garden was specially designed to highten the pleasure and instruction of all who walked in and around her.

The visitor could:

Hillwood Gardens, Washington D.C.

• get to know and distinguish new and familiar objects
• understand the principle used to organize things 
• reflect in a setting conducive to private experience 
• converse socially with others about a common experience
• relate one area  to another for greater understanding
• remember what had been experienced
• appreciate and sensually experience beautiful surroundings 

An education indeed! And if you think about it, these are all qualities we would hope for in our school libraries.

For all the above reasons and a few others, the library as garden is more than just a metaphor. I am not saying we should move earth and fountains into our school libraries (though a few more flowers wouldn't hurt).

The School Library as a Formal Garden

A Formal Plan for the School Library

So let's consider planning a school library, elementary or secondary, as a kind of horticultural learning commons that

• organizes knowledge for meaningful activity and talk
• develops private reflection and social learning through story, inquiry, and conversation
• supports a  model of inquiry and its many features and phases
• allows for rearrangement to meet new challenges

All this within an interior space where form follows and suggests function.

I have chosen a typical layout, often found in elementary schools, to map this library garden: two classrooms knocked together. If my idea works at all, a good test would be if it could work with such a commonly found, if unassuming, architecture. Your own library space may be grander, differently shaped, or better appointed. For instance, my template's entrances, exits, workrooms, and seminar rooms may not match your layout. All the better challenge to see if this design works for you.

Notes on the Design

1. Storytelling, reading, and conversation are all central to the design. The design accommodates a strong storybook program in elementary libraries, as well as a dramatic book talk approach in middle and secondary libraries. Even the process of inquiry might be considered a variation on the telling of stories. On the other hand, a story could lead more naturally to an inquiry activity in the surrounding spaces.
2. The four quadrants reflect the inquiry process outlined in Together for Learning. The design encourages you to walk the talk as it were, just as you walk a labyrinth to experience the mystery at the centre.
3. One area is related to  all other areas within a wholistic context of knowledge and experience. There are epistemological implications here that run deep in the practice of librarianship. 
4. The furniture arrangement in each different areas seeks to reflect the diverse activity in that area. For instance, group work and individual work may look different in each area. I have stuck to low tech options for a start. You may have other ideas depending on experience and budget. 
5. Computers as such are minimalized only because I believe such devices as tablets and PDAs will provide greater flexibility, portability, and social connection, in line with current student practice outside the library/garden.
6. Book shelving is somewhat problematic but the idea is that low shelves encourage space and vision, tall shelves allow for traditional collections (for the present). Imagine different uses for low shelves (e.g., storybooks, reference, media, and displays of student work). Putting castors on low shelves increases flexibility for the whole room, suddenly opening up some areas while defying others.
7. Monitoring meaningful learning behaviour is relatively easy in a formal space such as this, with good sight lines and traffic patterns.
8. The ubiquitous whiteboard is more a metaphor for inquiry-based activity than a preferred technology. Note that it is a common feature in each of the four quadrants.
9. I have imagined the window light shining in particularly on the first and last stage of inquiry and the story centre. I like the symmetry of inspiration here.

Conclusion

I hope you enjoy talking about this idea and forwarding thoughts and variations. Feel free to borrow this idea formally or change it to suit your needs. As Juliet said in Romeo and Juliet:

      What's in a name? that which we call a rose

      By any other name would smell as sweet.

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The Key to Collaboration: Interdisciplinary Habits of Mind

SUMMARY: To collaborate effectively, educators need to develop and apply interdisciplinary habits of mind. Observations and questions are provided around such concepts as connections, complexity, method, creativity, inquiry, diversity, innovation, and metacognition.


Collaboration: Just Talk?

Educators seek to collaborate with each other to improve teaching and learning. However, without the habits of interdisciplinary thinking and acting such collaboration is often short-lived and ineffective.

Interdisciplinary Habits of Mind

True collaboration is not merely collegiality,  cooperation, or consultation among teachers, teacher-librarians, administrators, and instructional support staff. It depends on shifting the mind away from a narrow subject-based topic to focussing on how learners learn. This shift requires a interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, or transdisciplinary approach.

In future blogs I will return with detail and examples to each of the qualities of mind in the diagram to the right. For now, I'll make some quick observations and ask a few pertinent questions.

Connections: What's a meta for?

The ability to make connections between apparently disparate phenomena lies at the heart of learning, let alone learning something new. The power of metaphor, comparison, and analogy can be harnessed at all grades and contexts. We are all capable of what some call "the poetic imagination."

How often do we build in connections from prior learning to new learning by referring to objects, people, ideas, and events outside our immediate discipline?

Complexity: How simple is simplicity?

It is relatively simpler to study the parts separately than connect them into a whole for deeper meaning. Synthesis requires analysis. The interdisciplinary mind deliberately woos complexity. Wisdom often comes when complex data resolves into unified insight.

How often do we encourage students to approach information as random data and to hold off developing a theory or conclusion for days or weeks?

Method: How systematic is your system?

Any system for initiating, testing, organizing, or processing information is limited by both the thinker's experience and his/her discipline's assumptions. Imagine the learning power from watching the music teacher "compose" a piece according to mathematical principles or the mathematician turn an equation into a musical sequence. Scientific method and poetic analysis have much in common.

How many of us master each discipline's method of inquiry and model them all with our students at the appropriate time?

Creativity: What was Leonardo's Secret?

Who knows! However, the ambidextrous, techno-scientist, military architect, and medical artist knew that curiosity -- a key to creativity --  is a process of the mind, heart, and body that is not bound by a particular discipline.

How often do we ask ask students to study the creative process of the men and women behind the particular disciplinary topic currently being studied?

Inquiry: Is it a process or destination?

To explore, investigate, process, and create is a bond among all disciplines in the curriculum. Elementary schools are more likely to promote school-wide inquiry activities that share interdisciplinary knowledge. Is that because we feel we need to "cover" the curriculum in secondary school and assess the product of learning above all?

How often do we plan a research project/product, only to be surprised that plagiarism, unoriginality, and lack of application to real-life has resulted in the student performance?

Diversity: Do we really share 50% of an earthworm's DNA?

Diversity is not just about ecology. A curriculum that encourages the continual studying of diverse opinion, perspective, or approach should not lead to facile agreement but to respect of the wider human experience. In the many, we find both similarity and difference. No one discipline can teach the whole person.

How will 21st century classrooms reflect the diversity of experience created by the social networking, and bridge the gap between school and a student's private life?

Innovation: What does new wine in new bottles taste like?

The interdisciplinary mind combines the exploration of recurrent problems within disciplines with the searching for new solutions across disciplines. Innovation often results when you are outside your comfort zone or beyond your initial assumptions.

How often do we actually expect students to exhibit new thinking or reward them for it?

Metacognition: Do only philosophers think about thinking?

The ability to think about thinking, learn about learning, and reflect about reflecting is deliberately and daily developed in interdisciplinary approaches. Students find it initially hard but ultimately liberating. The unexamined life is rarely an interdisciplinary one.

How often do we exhibit, test, and discuss our own thinking in front of our students?  

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Learning Commons Episode 7: Going to the Wall with Daily Inquiry

SUMMARY: School libraries need to encourage a continuous climate of inquiry. Ways to create dynamic spaces for inquiry are explored. Practical and creative suggestions to promote the inquiry process are offered, with a caveat.


The Basic Idea

Three weeks ago on this blog, my daughter Alice wrote of her experience at Waterloo University, where high school students collaborated on mathematical questions and problems, using gathering places with walls and boards to record their ongoing inquiry. Common in university settings, the idea could have innovative application in 21st century schools.

Template for Inquiry Wall 1

In particular, teacher-librarians could harness this idea in our elementary and secondary school libraries by creating special areas for ad hoc inquiry. Here students could work together over a day, a week, a month etc. on a question we pose to them or better still they pose to each other. This is often formerly done with a captive class. However, the idea here is to establish a place that encourages a continuous climate of spontaneous inquiry to develop self-motivated, reflective habits of mind. In other words, when students decide they have a question, they go to this area to collaboratively inquire about it.

Such areas begin the transformation towards the whole library as a learning commons.

Creating the Space

How do you start? Wherever you can within your library, create a learning commons/inquiry space that balances private work and public access. Sign it well. Make it inviting, beautiful, and functional, with a relaxed atmosphere to encourage social networking.

Centre it around blackboards, bulletin boards, flip charts, or white boards. Arrange chairs and other furniture to establish the space. You can create a virtual space, of course, on a school network through chat, wiki etc. but the visual display of simultaneous information sharing is optimum here. It captures the palpable excitement of real-time learning.

Template for Inquiry Wall 2

There are myriad ways to set up the writing and recording surfaces, depending on the question and grade level. Be sure to provide paper, stickies, coloured pens, and even cameras to record stages of thinking and sharing.

The recording of ideas, research data, conclusions, etc. can be done simply or you can get fancy. For instance, you could begin with an open-ended template (Slide 1). You could experiment with stickies -- even using different colours for questions, data, conclusions etc (Slide 2).

See if you can work towards implementing your library's inquiry model. Slide 3 is based on work done by the Ontario Library Association. (see my March blogs for details). Get staff and students involved in the enterprise by making their own templates for different situations.

Insist on rules that both preserve and respect everyone's contribution. Nearby, display some words of guidance or witty quotations about what makes for good conversation and problem solving. Set appropriate limits regarding language and graphics to focus on learning and meaningful talk.

Template for Inquiry Wall 3

Promoting the Idea

Whenever students, individually or as a class, come into the library, invite them to visit the inquiry/commons area and engage in the process. Make announcements each day/week etc. on the sound system, newsletters, or teacher notes about the question currently being posed, collaborations noted, and progress being made.

Celebrate answers and solutions reached with the whole school and follow up the inquiry with real action where appropriate. Inquiry counts!

Hold inquiry marathons for particular groups, timed for energy and fun. Perhaps invite an audience.

Organize part of a class visit around the inquiry area to get a larger project going. Whenever a small group asks a "library" question, take them over to the inquiry area and work through it on paper, modelling the process of inquiry for them.

Collaborate, collaborate, collaborate

Work with subject teachers, school club members, administrative teams, and parents to generate interesting and authentic questions for each inquiry. Share the process and your particular applications of it with local school librarians, administrators, and board personnel.

Write me a comment on this blog or better still tell us all about it on our library network at http://lcommons.org/. For more details and context about this network, please go to my blog post here.

Caveat

Inquiry is at the heart of the idea of the library as a learning commons. The heart pumps -- continually, loudly, and dynamically. Be prepared for active learning and enjoy new life in your collaborative learning space!

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Gauntley’s Best: 1. Reference Websites for Secondary Schools - Encyclopedias, Dictionaries, Almanac, etc.

Remembering vs. Searching

To be efficient and focussed researchers, teachers and tudents should actually know content-rich resources by name rather than relying always on search engines and random links. It is particularly important that in a time of information flux we are able to carrying a personal memory-bank of dependable sources around with us from one learning situation to another. Bookmarking is a kind of digital memory but it can become too easy a depository to "dump" things into. Everyone can remember YouTube and Google's URL. Where would you repeatedly go for a good online dictionary or almanac?

A New Blog Series Starts Today

As a teacher-librarian, I can not resist beginning a new series here which identifies key websites for teaching, learning, and curriculum support.  I will use a directory approach that allows you to see all of the sites at a single glance. All links are live from this blog.

The criteria I use to choose these sites are the same six that I would teach in the school library: authority, accuracy, currency, relevance, comprehensiveness, and accessibility (aka. friendliness). For this blog, I will concentrate on sites which are mainly free of charge, clear of ads when possible, and not based on database subscriptions that many school libraries are otherwise able to offer. 

Reference Websites Kickstart Research and Inquiry

Like traditional reference books, reference-based websites are dependable friends, often used to begin a research project. They both strengthen students' research and inquiry in five ways. They

1. quickly establish a point of departure
2. summarize important factual information about people, places, and things
3. establish answers to explicit factual questions.
4. present overviews of information that might otherwise swamp apprentice researchers.
5. encourage deeper browsing and discovery, through directed references and hyperlinks. 

Reference Websites for Secondary Schools: Encyclopedias, Dictionaries, Almanacs, etc.

My first list today is of key reference websites for secondary students that highlight online encyclopedias, dictionaries, almanacs, etc. Canadian sites are in red. Please let me know if you find these sites useful and if you have additional favorites.

By the way, each time that I add new lists, they will be added as tables in convenient groupings to the Pages section on the right frame of this blog. Check the first one here. 

• Abbreviations and Acronyms Resource
• Biographical Dictionary
• Calendars Guide
• Canadian Dictionary of Biography Online
• Canadian Encyclopedia/The Encyclopedia of Music in Canada
• Convert Plus Online Units Conversion
• Dictionary Search
• E-STAT Statistics Canada
• Encyclopedia Britannica
• Info Please Almanac
• L'Encyclopédie Canadian/Encyclopédie de la music
• Nation Master
• Quotations Page
• Rankings and Awards
• Ref Desk: Fact Checker for the Internet
• Thesaurus.com
• Wikipedia

In the coming weeks, I will provide similar lists for information portals and web directories, news and media sites, and libraries, museums and galleries. I will then proceed to cover the same territory for elementary schools.

Become a real webmaster. Amaze your friends and memorize the url or name of these sites!

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Evoke-a-Gram 1: From Data to Wisdom

Here is my first of a new theme: creating diagrams that are constructed in order to evoke questions, thought, and discussion. I call them “evoke-a-grams.” (Humour me!)

Inspired by suggestions from cognitive science, I offer the above diagram for application to our study of instructional design, particularly for inquiry-based curriculum units and activities. Please see Constructive Perception: An Expertise to Use Diagrams for Dynamic Interactivity. Masaki Suwa in Proceedings of the Twenty-Fourth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. 2002.

My questions, like the diagram elements, are deliberately general, vague, and ambiguous: 

1. What is the relationship between the two halves of this diagram, and between the elements within each half?
2. How does colour and shape evoke the construction of your meaning of this diagram?
3. How are the arrows suggesting ways to you to interpret this diagram?
4. How does the arrangement and nature of the texts used evoke ideas?
5. What is confusing about this diagram? What is clear?
6. Based on what you think this diagram is about, how would you apply your understanding to educational practice?

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Essential Interdisciplinary Questions for Curriculum Design

Let’s say you are a teacher of science, about to design a curriculum unit on light. Wiggins and McTighe (Understanding by Design, ASCD, 1998) would argue that one of the first things you should do is to identify the essential questions, key understandings, or chief learnings, about light. For instance, I remember Grant saying that one of his favorite questions was “Is light a particle or a wave?” 

Let’s extrapolate. Such a question also suggests an essential understanding that lies at the heart of science as a discipline: “How is a scientific hypothesis formed from apparent opposites?” 

Let’s go even further. Such a question also suggests an essential understanding about inquiry itself: “Which methodologies and perspectives are best applied to resolve apparent opposites?” This last understanding or question is interdisciplinary. In fact, as Jamie McKenzie points out: 

Most essential questions are interdisciplinary in nature. They cut across the lines created by schools and scholars to mark the terrain of departments and disciplines. 

Helping to design Ontario’s Interdisciplinary Studies curriculum a decade ago, I established several key concepts and goals that were at the heart of interdisciplinary work. In hindsight, I would now synthesize them into the following eight questions that, by extrapolation, a teacher could use to strengthen and focus any curriculum unit, at any grade.

1. How does this unit connect concepts and skills from different subjects and disciplines for deeper understanding?

2. How does this unit help students analyze and evaluate complex information from divergent sources?

3. How does this unit develop students' abilities to plan, work, and communicate independently and collaboratively?

4. How does this unit encourage students to develop inquiry and research methods from diverse disciplines to solve problems and to find solutions?

5. How does this unit develop students’ abilities to use different perspectives and challenge their assumptions about significant issues in their life and world?

6. How does this unit harness students’ higher-level critical- and creative-thinking skills and technologies from a variety of disciplines to implement innovative solutions.

7. How does this unit help students to synthesize insights form different disciplines and extend them to new contexts and real-life  tasks?

8. How does this unit foster students' love of learning and an understanding of how to learn?

So my essential question for today is “How can you use interdisciplinary questions to deepen the design of your next disciplinary unit?” 

Can you use your interdisciplinary knowledge to identify who wrote one of my favourite interdisciplinary quotations?

[It was] an initiation into the love of learning, of learning how to learn, that was revealed to me by my BLS masters as a matter of interdisciplinary cognition—that is, learning to know something by its relation to something else.

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Creating: The Fourth Stage of the Inquiry Process

The fourth stage of the inquiry process, as identified by our work with the Ontario School Library Association, is termed creating. 

This stage concentrates activity on the construction and communication of knowledge. Excitement builds, as students who have engaged in the inquiry process deeply and broadly, naturally want to share their results. In academic settings, this is usually done in three ways:

• the student makes and presents the product of their inquiry in the way most appropriate to the assignment, audience, topic, and context. Such ways include a large repertoire of formats and formats (e.g., print pamphlet, media collage, digital website, oral presentation, written essay, artistic representation). 
• the student and teacher finalize the assessment and evaluation of the product and process in ways stated and understood in advance, using clear and fair tools and recording decices (e.g., rubrics, achievement charts, checklists, conferences, test). Such assessment has as its chief purpose the improvement of student learning.
• the student reflects on his/her learning in ways that foster its extension and transfer to other inquiries. Such reflection deepens the inquiry experience and brings new meaning to new contexts, both immediate and lifelong.

It is easy to get the balance between process and product wrong. For me, it is about intention. For instance, there are situations where it is perfectly reasonable to let the fruit of one’s labour speak for itself. The in-competition performance of a cello piece might be the culmination of a process the audience can’t be expected to see as they rise to applaud the performer. In other situations, the nurturing of the fruit is the most important thing. Being able to identify and discuss the strengths and areas for improvement in using historical archives may be, in fact, the heart of the change sought in an individual’s learning.

The creating stage is a time for teachers both to carefully assess student performance and to examine the ways in which they usually assess students. So in the following weeks, I want to discuss assessment strategies, in ways that are compatible with current practice.

Checklist of Teaching/Learning Strategies 

In the meantime, I have posted Page Three Checklist of Teaching/Learning Strategies based on the large glossary I finished last week. I hope this will help teachers organize assessments, share their goals with students and parents, and ultimately record, balance, and increase their repertoire of pedagogies. 

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Processing: The Third Stage of the Inquiry Process

The third stage of the inquiry process, as identified by our work with the Ontario School Library Association, is termed processing. 

Here students engage in the deep work of constructing meaning out of the information and ideas generated from the plans, sources, and focus of the previous stage.

For some, this is where the rubber hits the road and the hardest work begins, as the inquiry requires the development of higher-order thinking and organizational skills such as:

• analyzing the interest, accuracy, depth, and relevance of the information found to date
• evaluating the development and significance of the ideas formed to date
• organizing and synthesizing ideas and information in preparation for communicating them.

Furthermore, the teacher or teacher-librarian needs a varied treasury of direct and indirect strategies to support both the dependent and independent learner. Such strategies will include organizers, checklists, and conferences. More than at any stage, progress here may be uneven, but eventually so personally rewarding. 

There is a direct relation between the success of this stage of inquiry and the previous stages. For instance, if a student's initial questions about the topic were superficial and weakly formed, likely his analysis will be as well. If the student's focus or thesis was too wide or too narrow, her application of relevant information to develop the ideas will prove frustrating. If the student gathered information without planned limits or supporting documentation disparate, synthesizing it into forceful and well supported ideas will be difficult.

You can see why regular teacher assessment and guidance is vital to prevent errors from being compounded in the last stage of the  inquiry. Next week: creating, to share the results of the inquiry.

The Glossary of Teaching/Learning Strategies

My evolving glossary is now complete as planned to include inquiry-based strategies. Please read the glossary and comment on your favorite strategies, especially any that are missing from my list.

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Investigating: The Second Stage of the Inquiry Process

The second stage of the inquiry process, as identified by our work with the Ontario School Library Association, is termed investigating. 

Here students begin to gather their preliminary  ideas and questions to set a direction for their inquiry: they make a plan, then search sources for relevant information, and finally construct a focus. It is a stage usually marked by great excitement and engagement as students feel they are on a roll. As a teacher-librarian, I find a light but firm touch here is best, being accessible for advice but getting out of the way when possible. 

First, when creating a plan for inquiry, students often need guidance to determine which of the many organizers seem best such as:

• step-by-step plans (“first I must do this, then I can do that”)
• contingency plans (“if I find this, then I will do that”)
• calendar-based plans (“I will do this on X, for Y days, to reach a goal Z”).

Secondly, when searching for information, many students go off the rails if they have not done strong preliminary work with asking effective questions. Often, they will have to go back briefly and reformulate these questions to make them more probing and significant. Moreover, this stage’s behaviors are an interesting paradox: finding seems more important than searching, but browsing seems vital to follow unexpected leads.

Lastly, students must construct a focus (e.g., a thesis, a main idea, a particular slant, hook, or position). Here, teacher/peer guidance is essential, as student powers of analysis are being developed in preparation for the third stage of the process. I want to investigate this moment of focus building in greater depth in a later blog, where I can discuss ways of improving the chances of success through good curriculum design.

The steps in this second stage should be shared and celebrated to reinforce mutual delight in inquiry, However, time is needed to treat the whole stage as circular and recursive. Skilled inquirers recognize what I call the three “R”s of original research: the need to return to examine original assumptions, the re-searching of a topic based on new information, and the reformulating of a focus when things take an interesting turn.

Next week, the hardest stage for many: actually processing what you have found and determining what you intend to do with it!

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The Inquiry Process: At the Heart of Design

This week’s blog begins a stage-by-stage posting over the next four weeks that highlights learning by inquiry. My career in teacher-librarianship convinces me that at the heart of great curriculum design is the scaffolding of ways to guide all students in learning about inquiry as a process, not just as a product.

So many inquiry or research assignments/projects in school are what David Loertsher calls “Bird Projects.” They are poorly conceived, constructed, and delivered and rarely engage learners in subjects that matter to them. Knowing how students actually inquire (e.g., exploring, investigating, processing, and creating) is essential to learning. Building this into the collaborative design of an assignment, can make all the difference.

The diagram above represents Exploring, the first stage of inquiry in which students engage. Notice the guiding teacher questions to assist the process, as well as the achievement standards that are identical in each stage. Experience shows how vital this first stage is to success and joy in an inquiry-based activity in any subject, as it increases teacher awareness of affective and cognitive realities for all students K-12. For instance, do you ever ask students about how what they already know about a topic can change the way they feel as they begin their research? 

The diagram is based on work found in the new document from the Ontario School Library Association Together for Learning: School Libraries and the Emergence of the Learning Commons. I had the privilege of leading the chapter on inquiry with my colleague Cathi Gibson. We based our work on research and evidence (Ross Todd, David Loertsher, Carol Kuhlthau et. al.) about how student achievement increases when guided inquiry becomes part of a school’s learning culture. Carol's Guided Inquiry: Learning in the 21st Century is essential reading for all teachers and administrators.  

So throughout March I will be posting the following:             

• diagrams of all four stages of the inquiry process
• inquiry-based teaching and learning strategies on my Page 1
• web links to important writings on the inquiry process, particularly its connection to curriculum design.

I hope you remain inquisitive!

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