Hello Jenny and Darryl,
Thank you so much for the Zoom last night. It was very generous of you to spend some of what must be a treasured Sunday morning with us. I think the work you are doing is wonderful, detailed, rigorous, and definitely provides a road map for teachers and teacher librarians to frame, conduct and assess inquiry tasks. I took away these main things:
- Your work is essential for all teachers and teacher librarians (the Australian term for school librarians), for all inquiry teachers.
- There may be a fruitful field for the Australian TL course to be taken on by some UK teachers, interested in inquiry and in a move to the library.
- Because your school librarians are not teachers, they might benefit from learning how to support teachers doing inquiry with e.g. the LibGuides path, an example here, from Brigidine College, St. Ives.
- Considering the NSW Information Fluency Framework , and your opinion that it does not have a total picture of inquiry in mind, I’m thinking about that, and agreeing up to a point, in that I don’t think that was June Wall’s purpose. However, I think it can be aligned to FOSIL, and I tried to do that in the recent issue of ACCESS journal, finding, similarly to your experience, that the impacts of information fluency do lie in those wider competencies you picture in the Portraits of Engaged Learners. But they are included in IFF. You said that Barbara Stripling has drawn them out and away from ESIFC, and is now trying to align them again?
- That may or may not be so! What I am grappling with is how to use IFF outcomes as evidence of student learning encouraged by the teacher librarian, in an inquiry unit that is an open ended Ancient Historical Investigation. The thing is, there are so many elements of IFF involved in a big inquiry task like this one, that it is very difficult to restrain that quantity to something manageable and assessable.
- I’ve downloaded a Word version of Ithoughts this morning, and will play with it!
- I went and looked at Galileo Focus on Inquiry and found it excellent – I particularly like the discipline-based approach to inquiry.
Jenny, thank you for your input here about the EPQ project – it was very interesting to read. We have some major projects in senior years in individual subjects here, and one of the recommendations from a review of the Australian Curriculum was that there may be a similar across the curriculum project like EPQ, but the wheels are moving very slowly on that.
Thank you again for your time, and patience, and we both hope to see you in Rome.
Lee Fitzgerald
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