Is it just me, or is does this “Never-Ending Circle of Creative Woe” look a whole lot like Kuhlthau’s Information Search Process?? I think I need to buy one of these prints …
Making the blog rounds lately is this research map from the Kentucky Virtual Library. In terms in style, flow, pathway, or metaphor, how does this help/illuminate/change the way you approach the research process with students?
A preservice teacher told me once about observing a research project in which each student researched about an animal from a particular branch of the animal kingdom. She talked about how energetic the students were and how the resulting informative posters added color and splash to the classroom. The students, she said, really understood their animal.
I asked her why the students had done the project. “To learn about that group of animals,” she said. I asked her again: “Why did they do learn about individual animals?”
“To learn about classification.”
“How did the lesson help them learn about classification? Did they sort their animals to try to create or replicate a classification scheme?”
I watched something dawn on her face. “They just did the posters and hung them up.”
“So how did the research and the poster help them learn about classification?”
“It didn’t,” she replied. She was right. The task had become uncoupled from its objective of deeper understanding of classification.
Now, there’s no devil in this story. The teacher is exemplary in her field and had set aside a lot of time so her students would have a research opportunity. The preservice teacher has crackerjack observational skills. The students obviously completed the task with aplomb. But what had accidentally gotten lost in the hustle-bustle of the myriad of tasks on each party’s plate was that the task (making a poster) did not help students reach the objective of classification. The assessment didn’t match the learning objective.
It doesn’t mean that the project was a waste, by any means. Imagine extending it by one more day. The posters are done. The teacher clears a big empty spot in the middle of the room, and the students lay down their posters. Together, they sort them by common characteristics. How might they sort them into a scheme using their prior knowledge or what they learned in the individual research? How might they sort by habitat? color? longevity? diet? How might they apply the existing classification scheme and sort the posters into the formally-accepted hierarchy? How might the Latin names turn from mumbo-jumbo into clues as to the animal’s classification?
One thing librarians can bring to collaborative work with classroom teachers is a fresh perspective. And so we’re looking for your input: how do you match your lesson objectives — or the standard(s) you are trying to meet — with the assessments you design? How do you help assessments go beyond meeting minimum expectations on a checklist?
PS - Did you notice that I didn’t mention which type of animals the class studied? That’s intentional (even though it made for crummier writing). In the comments, take a guess …. how old were these students?
