C52: Research Skills (1-6)

Welcome back my elementary friends.  Sorry for the delay the past few weeks, but I’ve been busy preparing for my school’s verification visit in less than a month.  I’ve been working crazy hours, but I’m still trying to make some time for the things I love, like being here with you and sharing more ideas. 

When I think of research skills, it’s more than looking something up on a computer or book.  It’s more about what we do with the information after we have received it.   Since it can be more labor intensive and cerebral, I think many teachers just pass it off as completing a research project.  Today, we are going to explore how we can take it a step further. 

When we are preparing the learning space for research, we need to consider our purpose.  There are several things that we can do as educators to set the stage for research to become a routine practice within our units of inquiry. 

We can…
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• Plan transdisciplinary and subject-specific inquiries in which students can develop, apply and reflect on their research skills.
• Provide a range of tools for students to organize their research so that all stages are documented.
• Model academic integrity by providing proper citations and references for materials and ideas that are shared with students.
• Collaborate with, for example, the librarian and technology specialists
• Support students to build research skills and to learn how to identify reliable sources of information.

When I read this list, many ideas pop into my mind.  First, we need to be intentional when planning inquiries to have a research focus.  That seems obvious, right?  Not so much, if you are focused on getting content taught.  Being mindful is key with the ATLs. 

​How are we providing a range of tools, so students can research on their own and self-select based on the purpose of the inquiry?  Yikes, this sounds huge at first, but this could simply be presenting 5-7 visible thinking routines to our students and graphic organizers and teaching them how to self-select based on purpose.  Hmm...that sounds doable.  The key is to have all of these processes formally and informally documented, so the student is able to talk through it with their parents at the end of the year. 
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When we are teaching explicit research skills, we need to teach them about reliable sources and which search engines are vetted.  Oftentimes, fake news is taken to be real.  This is our chance to teach them how to vet these sources and accredit them through proper citations.  We don’t have to do this process alone, because we have our librarian and technology specialist to lend a hand too. 

Now, what will the students be doing during this time?  Let’s take a peek at the sub-skills they will be focusing on to become more independent researchers. 
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• Formulating and planning
• Data gathering and recording
• Synthesizing and interpreting
• Evaluating and communicating
• Media literacy
• Ethical use of media/information

Now, let’s take a deeper look at one of the ATL sub-skills

Synthesizing and Interpreting

​We like to truly understand what we are learning, which is why we like to synthesize and interpret information.  If you're like me, you might do this too much.  But, this process helps us to internalize information to create meaning. 

Sort and categorize information

This first one is quite deep, so I’m going to try and deconstruct to the best of my ability.  

Narrative

How are we teaching the form and structure of a narrative text to our students?  Are we solely teaching the plot diagram and character traits?  There is so much more to narrative than that.  How are we examining the language used to create a mood?  Can we capture events in our mind that give a sense of time and space?  How are we capturing voice? 

Explanatory

An information report can be dry and formulaic.  How can we ignite passion when writing and reading these types of texts?  We can use visible thinking routines to help us look at information differently.  Use graphic organizers and other visuals to help us sort and categorize information. The possibilities are endless.

Procedural

When setting up this type of text, we can use a lot of visuals to help us sort and categorize information.  We can have sequence cards to help students understand the step by step nature of this writing.  But is there more?  I think something that would be more powerful is having a sorting activity that goes to the heart of why procedural texts are important and how they organize our world. What that looks like will depend on you and your students. 

Data Handling​

Recently, I modeled a lesson about data sets and how dot plots help us to organize and structure the information.  This was an aha for the students to know that dot plots have a purpose and they aren’t just something on a test.  Then, we applied our thinking to connect to a frequency table.  These are the connections we want to make when using data.

​Use critical literacy skills to analyze and interpret information

I feel like we embedded this process into the above examples.  The key is how are we going beyond the factual content and getting students to take more ownership of the thinking?  How are they researching with the purpose to not only obtain new information, but understand and apply it?  This can only happen through open-ended questioning, use of a variety of reflection tools and formative assessments, and specific direct instruction that creates aha moments.  

Let’s try to be better at making the ATL research skills a more vibrant part of our teaching, rather than a formulaic process of gathering information.  Research is not one-size fits all.