LIBE 467: Post 2

I have always known the importance of research projects and, to accompany them, research processes. Such projects do a number of things that we know are valuable for students:
• Personalize learning (student choice regarding topics and resources)
• Engage students with multiple perspectives
• Focus learning on inquiry-based models of education
• Engage students with multiple forms of media and technology (encouraging aspects of many of the hallmarks of “21st Century Learning”—for example, quick student publishing, student interaction online, use of multiple types of technologies)

We know intuitively as teachers (and as former students who experienced some wonderful research projects along the way from kindergarten throughout our graduate school experiences) that research projects are valuable for a number of reasons.

And yet, what amazes me is the number of research-based projects that are NOT happening in high schools. Apart from social studies classrooms, I see very few research projects happening at my school—a secondary school that, according to all external measures (read: The Fraser Report), does well from year to year. One concrete reason for this lack of research-based projects in my high school stems from this specific issue: mandatory Provincial exams (for English classes) and Advanced Placement exams tend to be the ultimate focus of teachers who teach courses where these exams exist, and there is no direct connection between research-based projects and doing well on these exams. When working within a system that publishes a limited amount of qualitative data regarding the “success” of schools or performance of students—student marks and Provincial Exam scores—there is limited incentive for teachers to invest time in research-based projects if the teachers do not see a connection between their efforts and their students’ measurable performance indicators (I discuss some of the complexities of this systemic situation in this blog post).

So then: the above comments serve to illustrate some of the large-scale issues that I see affecting teachers’ engagement with—or lack of engagement with—research-based projects (and, by extension, teachers’ interaction—or lack of interaction—with TLs). As someone interested in general in librarianship, specifically in teacher-librarianship, and as someone who has been taking teacher-librarian courses, I more and more notice how—relative to my colleagues around me—I live in an idealist teacher-librarian bubble. One of the features of this bubble is that I clearly see and understand the importance of the work of TLs and their role in collaborating with colleagues, facilitating research-based and inquiry-based learning, encouraging the application of technology, etc. However, it often seems the case that many teachers are already fully engaged with and entirely busy with their own curriculum, their own demands, and view the efforts of the TL to engage in collaborative work as nothing more than a nuisance. So then, I find myself these days reading and studying about things like research-based projects with a sense of the absurd: will I enter a future job as a TL with idealism, enthusiasm, knowledge, and skills, only to be met by kind but dismissive smiles from colleagues that serve to suggest, “Thank you for the effort, but I am already fully busy—and don’t really have any more time—in my life as a teacher.”

However, despite the niggling notions mentioned above, some of the detail-oriented issues that I have learned about regarding research-based projects have helped sharpen my understanding of how to successfully navigate the details of implementing research-based projects. Some of these understandings have come in the form of confirmation of things I already: specifically, Riedling notes that “students have little knowledge of the information-seeking process, have fragmented understandings of subject knowledge, and...do not understand that their information seeking knowledge depends on content knowledge and vice versa” (10). While I have always intuited these conclusions myself, Riedling was the first to, in the arena of the published book, confirm these intuitions. I also appreciate Riedling’s assertion that, through the scaffolding and teaching of research-based projects, the TL creates “self-directed learners [that] lead themselves to knowledge from that information” (12).

Detail-oriented issues regarding the implementation of research-based projects that I have learned about from colleagues in this course are many. With regards to the details of quality student research, Hilary Montroy suggests this: students design a piece of paper with 16 squares on it, and each square can only contain 3 key words on it from the student’s research. In this way, students do not copy full sentences and are forced to put ideas into their own words. This helps encourage students toward genuine analysis and synthesis of ideas that will lead toward equally genuine understanding and insights—rather than arriving at the end of a research process and staring blankly and worriedly at a pile of information that feels disjointed.

Another valuable tip for promoting the success of research-based projects is to share the basic ideas and benefits of research models with parents. Anica, Hilary, and Chris collectively do a nice job of overviewing the benefits of such an act: with parents aware of the existence of, benefits of, and logistics of research models, we start to bend toward creating a culture that knows about and expects inquiry-based research to be at the heart of—or at least included in—what happens in the lives of students.

With the above collection of large-scale and small-scale ideas around research-based projects swimming in my mind, my next step is to more actively talk to the TL at my school, teachers at my school, and other TLs I know with regards to successfully navigating all the potential pitfalls I have identified. I feel like I need to see some concrete examples of schools that have instituted research models and inquiry-based education at the heart of their curriculum and have had success doing it—how did they do it? What were the big challenges? What have been the benefits?