Written by Our second Face 2 Face session at The York School was a whirlwind of inspiration and creativity as we followed a design thinking protocol, adapted from Design Thinking for Educators, to arrive at “how might we” questions to guide our Action Plans. Check out the thoughtful and informative posts from my SCS colleagues @chazzard and @adamcaplan for great run-downs of the day.
Since this awesome Google Hangout on design thinking our action plans earlier this fall, I had been collecting “how might I” questions in a Google doc every time I encountered a challenging library issue that arose for our students. I came to the second F2F confident that I would simply choose one of these to focus on. Going through the design thinking process, however, made see how a number of the problems I was considering are actually interrelated, from how we present library pathfinder information and do direct information literacy instruction, to teaching citation and academic honesty in the digital world. As I began to think through the empathizing piece and consider our students’ needs, I realized that many of my seemingly discrete “how might I”s were part of a larger question that I chose to focus on Grade 9: How might we ensure our Grade 9 students end the year feeling like more confident and competent researchers?
Through the ideate phase and following some really valuable discussion at my table, I sketched out a number of ways to meet this challenge that ranged from feasible to wild. Leveraging social media to answer student questions and experimenting with flipped classroom resources for direct instruction seemed like profitable routes to explore but “never sleep again” and “mind-control” were less so (ha ha). My favourite part of the day was the gallery share where we had the opportunity to reflect and offer suggestions, questions and resources to one another. I now have sticky notes with further avenues to pursue (that don’t involve magic powers) and more big questions to consider.
My mind is still spinning as I look back at my notes for iterating and building. I feel like I have really blown open the question and I am seeing its true size and complexity. Right now I’m not sure what will come next but I’m excited to continue using design thinking to think it through.
What a great question to start your explorations with! It’s really interesting how this process allows more questions to come up to the surface instead, it allows us an opportunity to enjoy the unknown. Thanks for sharing!
@gnichols @lmcbeth @shelleythomas @ddoucet
“How might we ensure our Grade 9 students end the year feeling like more confident and competent researchers?”
A question I am sure we are all face continue to tackle. I think the idea of “confidence” is a really interesting to explore. How might we begin to build that and measure its growth.
Thanks for the comments, I’m really feeling #embracetheambiguity these days! The language of “confident and competent” is borrowed from Dr. JoAnn Deak, who recently visited SCS. I’m going to look to her work to help answer how we measure and I’ll report back in a future post.
Great question indeed Laura. We struggle with this at times because, I feel, there is a disconnect between expectations of our students from year to year. How might we make students accountible for their research skills from year-to-year? We can give them vertically integrated skills, we can map out these skills onto specific assignments, and we can assess them on it. We can build on these skills from year to year with the proper communication.
One possible solution is to put together a research guide and map it to the different research skills/assessments that teachers are doing. For example, your guide will run from grades 7-12, and within each grade you can have a specific assignment in specific courses that will teach/assess these skills. THEN, you map those assignments onto the next year’s assessment. How do these assessments build on the skills; and, how do they require our students to apply the skills…
I may not be making any sense here, but hopefully, you can get something out of this. I worked on this at a past school, and am happy to share my experience 🙂
garth.
Thanks, Garth! Of course I’d love to chat more about your experience with this. We have a scope & sequence, we try to keep it a living document, and my Action Plan came out of conversations about it. It can be hard when we rely on collaborating with teachers to get access to the students, with different levels of buy-in year to year. How might we provide resources to students in that case? A multi-faceted problem! Let’s chat more!