teachers and teacher librarians developing inquiry …
TRANSCRIPT
“THEY SHOULD BE CALLED GUIDERS”:
TEACHERS AND TEACHER LIBRARIANS DEVELOPING INQUIRY LEARNERS
Kasey Garrison & Lee FitzGerald, Charles Sturt University
Alinda Sheerman, Broughton Anglican College
WHO WE ARE
• Dr. Kasey Garrison and Lee FitzGerald, former teacher librarians, lecturers in Masters of Education-Teacher Librarianship program, School of Information Studies, Faculty of Arts and Education, Charles Sturt University. • Alinda Sheerman is Head of Information Services,
Broughton Anglican College, Menangle Park, and adjunct with CSU Teacher Librarianship program.
GLOBAL TREND: IMBALANCE BETWEEN 21ST CENTURY SKILLS & TESTING CULTURE
• 21st Century Skills- Thinking Critically, Creativity, Collaboration, Empathy, Technology, Information literacy
• ACARA has embedded information literacy outcomes, general capabilities, and cross curricular priorities in syllabuses to cover these skills. And it’s happening across the world….
BUT:
• Globally, countries must appear to be “doing well” on the PISA tests.
• Nationally, schools and students must appear to be “doing well” in NAPLAN, HSC (and state tests)
• Domestically, schools must be accountable and performing (e.g. MySchool)
• Principals and teachers are being accredited in the AITSL scheme
• More content is being added to syllabuses.
• Teachers are time poor, worried about covering curriculum, and 21st century skills, and accreditation
POTENTIAL SOLUTION? GUIDED INQUIRY (GI)
• Grounded in the Information Search Process (ISP) • Research-based and developed by Kuhlthau (1985, 1988a, 1988b, 1989)
• Operationalised by the Guided Inquiry Design (GID) (Kuhlthau, Maniotes, & Caspari, 2007, 2012, 2015)• 7 Step process to guide research process
• Focuses on inquiry, choice, creativity, collaboration
• Deep in 21st Century Skills
• Stress on Information Literacy
OUR STUDY
The purpose of this study is to investigate the use of GI in a Year 9
History unit where students independently pursue their own
research topics to create a collaborative final product.
MIXED METHODOLOGY
• K-12 Independent Suburban School- uses GID school-wide
• 22 Volunteer Participants from three diverse Year 9 classes
• GI unit in History studying the Industrial Revolution over 9 weeks
• Data Sources• Surveys- pre, during, post unit; Student artifacts- research journals and final
products; Semi-structured Focus Group Interviews after the unit
• Content analysis focused on students’ development and use of Information Literacy Skills, what they find easy and difficult
• Mapped to National School Library Standards for Learners (2017)• Frequency counts and patterns in coded passages
AMERICAN ASSOCIATION OF SCHOOL LIBRARIANS’ NATIONAL SCHOOL LIBRARY
STANDARDS FOR LEARNERS
• Also includes standards for School Librarians and School Libraries
• Developed over a two-year period in consultation with teacher librarians, teachers, parents, administrators, students
• Six Shared Foundations (below) across Four Domains (Think, Create, Share, Grow) create 68 separate standards
• Replaced standards (1998, 2007) used in similar research guiding practitioners to do action research on their inquiry units
• SLIM Toolkit (Todd, Kuhlthau, & Heinström, 2005)
• Recent critique from David Loertscher (2018) - focus on inquiry skills. Others see this as a strength of the standards.
FINDINGS
LEARNER STANDARDSFrequency
CountsEasy Difficult
Inquire- “inquiring, thinking critically, identifying problems, and developing strategies for solving problems”
41 34
Include- “understanding of and commitment to inclusiveness and respect for diversity”
1 0
Collaborate- “Work effectively with others" 7 13
Curate- “collecting, organizing, and sharing resources of personal relevance”
27 52
Explore- “Discover and innovate in a growth mindset" 11 15
Engage- “safe, legal, and ethical creating and sharing of knowledge products independently while engaging in a community of practice and an interconnected world"
1 2
OVERALL TOTALS 88 116
FINDINGS:WHAT DO YOU FIND EASY?
USING THE PROCESS
• C.E.M.: The part I find easy is how it is laid out and not having to do it in all one go, it's all in different weeks like how you do the stages and all that. (I.B.2)
• Katniss: Well I'd say that it definitely does get easier like the more times you do it…it just like comes naturally to you. (I.B.2)
FINDING INFORMATION
• Jeff41: I think that especially like in this topic it was a lot easier to find reliable information so your gov and org and edu sites were a lot easier to come by (IV.A.2)
• Jughead: What is easy in research is probably just like finding all of those results there…you can find anything on the internet (IV.A.2)
FINDINGS:WHAT DO YOU FIND EASY?
CURIOSITY
• Mynamajeff: So I love like learning about the big picture stuff…so what I learned about the IR was that instead of it being like a period in time like the Stone Age or something, it was actually like a turning point in time in which society had changed from being like agriculturally based and like the entire society being based around, ok we need to find food and we need to just live, to more of a wealthier type of society which had more free time…which allowed a lot more innovations, inventions, and yea, developments of ideas. (V.C.1)
PARAPHRASING
• Jughead: I find it easy putting that information to my own words as well because copying is not something that we look up to really. (VI.B.1)
FINDINGS:WHAT DO YOU FIND DIFFICULT?
*FREEDOM AND INDEPENDENCE*
• Esteban: I reckon the hardest part would be finding out what I was going to do at the start (I.A.1)
• Dinkie: I find with the student led learning, I get a lot distracted. (I.A.1)
• Amy: I like having the teacher telling you things. (I.A.1)
GROUP WORK
• Kinsley: Yes, I like doing things by myself, because group work is like, messy. (III.A.3)
• Jack: I don't really like the idea of groups at all. I do kind of prefer going on my own. (III.A.3)
FINDINGS:WHAT DO YOU FIND DIFFICULT?
EVALUATING INFORMATION
• Firenze: I forget I have to use more than one to make sure the information is credible. (IV.B.1)
• Dylan: I generally find it easy to find the information, just a bit more difficult to validate it, to make sure it's true. (IV.B.3)
PRIMARY & SECONDARY SOURCES
• Annie: See, secondary sources are so much easier to find, because they've been like, published and gone through everyone else, but like first-hand data is so much better because it's like as if you were there…primary is more reliable (IV.B.3)
• Pablo: it's a bit hard when you are studying the IR because they didn't have Internet back then and they only had photography…whatever the description is given to that photo already, that description is already going to be secondary. (IV.A.3)
FINDINGS:WHAT DO YOU FIND DIFFICULT?
NARROWED TOPIC
• Kinsley: I find it really hard not to use Wikipedia. Because they have like stacks of information that you just want to use, but you can't, because like it's probably wrong, and like twisted a little bit….But then for books, it's really hard to find your topic. Because mine was like chimney sweeps and there's not like ANYTHING on chimney sweeps. IV.B.1
• Firenze: I find it difficult to use multiple sources at once, because I find one really good website and try to take as much information as I can from that, and I forget I have to use more than one to make sure the information is credible. IV.B.1
• Susie: sometimes when you are researching and you come across like a really big article, you just don't want to read it, you just look at it and you think I'm sure it has good information but I don't want to read through it....so you are really just going to skim over articles, not really get in depth on the article. V.A.1
CONCLUSIONS
Teachers need to:• learn more about inquiry learning.• strike a balance between direct instruction and independent
learning.• recognise an ally in the TL, who can help them with all aspects of
inquiry units, as an information literacy expert and co-teacher. • understand that students need guiding and feedback throughout
an inquiry: from teacher and TL.Students must learn 21c skills but must also cover content heavy curriculum. GI could be a way of doing both. It is at the deepest point of the GI process that students have the most difficulties – reading complex texts, and synthesising information into understanding.
A LAST WORD?
It is clear that there is a strong need to develop teacher understanding and involvement in inquiry learning, especially in the IL skills involved as well as their understanding of collaborating with the TL.
OECD (2010) offers a conclusion here: There is no single best method of teaching – “ that is even more true in the 21st century than in the past. Teachers today need to know how to combine ‘guided discovery’ with ‘direct instruction’ methods, depending on the individual students, the context of instruction and the aims of the teaching” (p. 47).
THANK YOU!
Kasey Garrison
Lee FitzGerald
Alinda Sheerman
References available upon request.