Reply To: Year 12 (Grade 11) Interrobang!? Inquiry Course @ Blanchelande College
Session 5: The information-to-knowledge journey
You can download the presentation I used for this session here.
Because this short course was skills and process focussed, most students did not have time to delve very deeply into their chosen topics (it was really largely an extended ‘Connect’ stage, particularly for those who went on to do an EPQ ), which made it difficult to spend much time on constructing understanding from a limited amount of investigation. This was not unexpected – a fair amount of the focus of the course was on Investigate and Express, and we have spoken before about the need to focus on certain stages in an inquiry because, while it is necessary to step through them all for a complete inquiry, it is rare to have the opportunity to spend as much time as we would like on every stage.
We did look at the use students had made of the Construct side of their investigative journals and discussed the difference between making notes directly from a source and then interpreting and commenting on those notes in the light of your question. We then spent most of this session working on their posters for the Interrobang evening. I gave everyone the same format (although they could decide whether to use a single sheet of A3 or to spread their work over two) so that the focus would be on the content not on poster design. The posters were supposed to showcase the different skills they had learnt at each stage – as you can see from this ‘Anatomy of a poster’ display that I made as part of the celebration evening.
For homework students completed their posters, using either just slide 1 or both slide 2 and slide 3 from this template. It is interesting to note that all of the four students who chose to use the two slide poster decided to continue on to do an EPQ after the interrobang course was finished (along with just one other student who chose the single slide poster).
Focus skills for this session:
- Construct: Develops own opinion, perspective, or claim and supports with evidence and a clear line of reasoning
- Express: Publishes final product for an authentic audience and real-world application [poster presentation for peers, parents, staff and governors]
