Reply To: Inquiry Learning and Collection Development

[Michael Crofts Participant]

Hi Kay,

I very much agree with your posited connection between the library collection, students’ learning levels and the inquiry task. A carefully curated collection is, to my mind, an essential requirement of any inquiry-based task.

“Thus, collection development and management requires teacher librarians to be knowledgeable of the curriculum and the various inquiry foci students engage with at each stage of their educational journey. Inquiry and collection development should be considered inextricably connected if we wish to offer students access to information resources which are suitable not only for their content, but also for their alignment with students’ learning levels and research capacity.”

Moreover, I’d like to add that an inquiry is a wonderful opportunity, which I fear is all too often missed, to teach students the value of different media. As a Computer Science teacher I frequently need to rebuff students’ over-reliance upon the internet, for which information is plentiful but rarely written for their learning level. I often find it heartening to watch as students who once relegated books as ‘not of our time’ find a new-found ability to better comprehend the information contained within them than that on the internet. However, I might add that I explicitly give them directed time with book, subscription database, and internet sources (in that order) so that they might reap the best of all worlds.

In order to better achieve this I rewrote one of my inquiry tasks, starting from the book sources in our curated collections. That way, the need to use them feels much more natural to students. If interested you can find an update to the post for the task to see its development here: https://fosil.org.uk/forums/topic/year-7-computer-science-inquiry-is-my-brain-a-computer/