Action Research

Getting Started on an April Evening

Art for Sale presents a challenge for students to research and add three pieces of art work to a collection. How will they integrate Pacific Northwestern art into a collection that has been fairly traditional in its taste? How does this WQ incorporate conceptual thinking, differing viewpoints and synthesizing ideas...as well as scaffolding the learning. Take a look and see what you think. Is this an appropriate activity for 3rd through 5th graders?

Non native species are invading everywhere. It's a problem in many parts of the world. What student doesn't love to study Hawaii. In this WQ students are examining this invasion in the context of the tropical paradise of Hawaii's ecosystems. In this WQ, I'm interested to see what you think of the resources they've selected and if you think they match the task. What do you think of the scaffolding? Is the task and evaluation well matched? Will middle school students be able to complete this task in the alloted time and able to synthesize the material into new thinking with what they are given?

Now take a moment to think about how what you've seen in these WQs should/can influence what you're doing with you're own WQ designs. It can be positive and negative. Add a comment below.

Reception Scaffolds

Something that helps learners to perceive, understand organize and retain relevant information.

Examples could be
glossaries
listening guides
interview guides or protocals
note taking frameworks

TappedIn notes that these are desgined to "take care of the fact that some students , some of the time, aren't full prepared to make sense of and fully make use of information we bring to them from more authentic and messy sources."

So we utilize structures to help them until they learn enough to do it for themselves. They just can't appreciate it because they can't take apart the information yet...when they can, they will understand what treasures you are bringing to them. With the power of the web, there are so many new things that they have never seen or had access to before that scaffolding will play an important part.

WebQuest Scaffolding types

Defintions to Get us Started

Giving some structure to what we're about to trying and design seemed like a good idea to me. Because people loosely throw around the name WebQuest when they really don't know what they are talking about...plain and simple. I don't want that to happen to you.

So here are a couple of defintions to help guide you.....

WebQuest
Guided inquiry learning activity wrapped around a challengin task which requires applying higher level thinking skills to information from the web, optionally submitted with other information.

Sometimes there are other levels of WebQuests that can be differentiated from one another

Short Term WQ
Here the instructional goal is knowledge acquisition and integration where the learner will have grappled with a significant amount of new information and made sense of it. A short-term WQ is designed to be completed in 1-3 class periods.

Longer Term WebQuest
In this kind of WQ you are trying to extend and refine student knowledge, so students would have analyzed a body of knowledge ddeply, transformed it in someway and demonstrated an understanding of the material by creating something that others can respond to. This kind of WQ usually takes between one week to a month in your class.

I think it will be important for you to think about which of the instructional goals you have in mind for your activity before you start to create an activity. They are both worthy tasks, but you will approach them very differently, I would guess.

At the heart of either WQ is the central focus. This is the challenging and complex task that pushes your students to THINK. Here's where it is particularly tricky....Bernie Dodge warns that often teachers think they are creating tasks that are using those higher level thinking skills when they are really just activities that have a common theme. He believes that lower elementary grade teachers have to guard against this pitfall.

One of the slippery slopes that plague teachers is the research report style. Generally speaking these ask students to gather information which is a good start and learning does take place. But that alone doesn't require HOTS because it doesn't require students to move beyond the summarizing, distilling, organizing information level. They never get to the synthesis or transformation stage.

So what are some of the skills that would be a good way to incorporate WQ....they might include things like comparing, classifying, inferring unknown generalizations from collected information or observations, deducing, analyzing errors, constructing support, identifying/articultating the underlying theme or pattern around the information they collected or analyzing perspectives from the issues students just researched. If you're interested in where I got this information you can look in Robert Marzano's book Dimensions of Thinking.

This post is just suppose to give you something to think about. It is meant to challenge your thinking...to gently nudge you out of your comfort zone and into a place of gentle discomfort where you are forced a bit into thinking , "Well what am I going to do?". That's because I want you to be generating tons of questions for our class discussion. I am hoping that you'll come to class with lots of wonderings....with lots of whats and how can I. That will then lead us into a class discussion where we can begin to explore the how will we's. So don't worry about not knowing how you're going to do this. No one does and that's the beauty of our group, that's why we have each other and that's the purpose of our class.

If you're really a bold person, use your own blog to do some outloud wondering. It's the purpose of the personal reflective blog...a place where you can put your ideas out there for all of us to see and to react to and for us to become each other's ally in finding our way through this class. So I'd also encourage you to try that at least once before we meet on the 21st.