Reply To: Extended and Higher Project Qualifications

[Jenny Toerien Keymaster]

Lessons vs seminars

My background is in Science teaching and, even since becoming a Librarian, I have been to a lot of teachmeets, so I understand how to structure a lesson – that you need planned changes of activity including ‘led-from-the-front’ discussion, group and paired work and individual work, and transitions between these. Plenty of opportunitues for modelling, discussion, practice, feedback and reflection.

My mistake going into EPQ lessons was that I was coming out of an IB EE system where in total over the course of the whole year I only had three one hour seminars (for the whole cohort at once, which was around 100 students) and two half hour ICT workshops with smaller groups. Of necessity these sessions tended to be lecture-style, pointing students to the resources they needed and hoping they would access them later. For the EPQ I had a one hour ‘lesson’ every week with just 4 or 5 students. However, I think (possibly partly because it was such a small group) I initially treated that as more of a lecture/conversation-based seminar rather than a more structured lesson. This meant we could go over a lot more content (still supported by a LibGuide that they could look back at in their prep time) but I was frustrated by how little of the skills and techniques we had discussed in lessons they seemed to be carrying over into their projects. I think I expected them to be able to apply what we had done in the lesson to their own projects in their prep time, in a way that perhaps I wouldn’t have expected as a Physics teacher if I hadn’t given opportunities to practise in the lesson.

The breakthrough for me in terms of how I view my lessons was starting the HPQ. I had a slightly larger group of younger pupils than the EPQ, and my lessons (for timetable reasons) were structured as two half hour sessions a week rather than a single one-hour session. One was in the Library during tutor time and the second was in a classroom with computers during the lunch hour. For this second session, the students tended to arrive at very different times so it rapidly became clear that it could not be a group teaching session and instead would need to be time for them to apply what we had been learning to their own projects, with me around to support and encourage them. This was the point at which I discovered how hard they found this, and how much individual ‘coaching’ was necessary. It’s important to say at this point that this in no way impacted on the independent nature of the qualification – they still needed to make their own decisions, find their own resources and shape the direction of their own projects, but I was able to play the role of coach and critical friend (note: I supervise all the HPQ students, but the EPQ students have their own supervisors – I am the co-ordinator and deliver the taught course for both groups).

Seeing how well this worked for the HPQ, I also started to scale back the amount of content in my EPQ lessons and tried to make sure there was time in the second half of the lesson for students to work on their own projects. This allowed for more individual conversations and really helped the students to understand how to apply the skills we had been learning to their own projects. It was an important reminder to me of one of the vital principles of inquiry (and good teaching generally) – the students should be working at least as hard as the teacher during the lessons. I also tried to incorporate more group tasks into the first half of the lesson, based on ‘dummy’ projects I had set up. E.g. for a lesson on refining the research question, the group are given the titles of a number of articles relating to a fictional research question and need to work together to group them by topic, put these topics in a logical order and then decide whether the research was really answering the original question or whether the question needed to be refined. Students find this much easier with a fictional topic than with their own, because the emotional investment isn’t there, so they are less attached to the initial question.

A couple of very successful lessons I have had this year have also been entirely self-paced (using a combination of the LibGuide and Teams). In one case this was because my son was ill and I was at home taking care of him, so was running the lesson remotely (flashback to COVID days!), and in another because I knew the students had very different skill levels for that particular topic so I wanted to let them work at different paces. Co-incidentally these lessons were the two that we used to run ICT workshops for for the IB EE students (citing and referencing, and setting up a Word template for the final report). The self-paced lessons were much more sucessful than ‘from the front’ guided workshops and I was much more confident that the students had practised and understood the necessary skills. It also meant they could revisit them at any point. If I ever had to deliver the EE ICT workshops again I would do them like this! I’ll provide more detail in a future post in case that is helpful for anyone.

So, in summary, the first lesson I have learnt is not to try to pack too much into each session, to vary activities and particularly to allow structured and supervised time for students to work out how to apply the lesson to their own projects.