Extended and Higher Project Qualifications

[Jenny Toerien Keymaster]

This Topic is a continuation of the FOSIL and the Extended Project Qualification (EPQ) Topic, and if you haven’t already seen that, it is worth browsing back through it to see the journey that has led us here. I decided to create a new Topic because we started the HPQ at Blanchelande (as a one year qualification in Y10) in September 2023 – I am just about to mark my first set of projects – and I feel I have learnt a number of lessons from running the two qualifications simultaneously that didn’t really belong in a Topic dedicated to the EPQ alone. However, this new Topic is certainly suitable for people posting about either the EPQ or the HPQ, so I felt it was time to move the discussion here instead.

My history in this area is that at Oakham School I was the Currulum Librarian for Upper School, with particular responsibility for supporting the IB Extended Essay process, although I was not the EE Co-ordinator there. We also ran the EPQ at Oakham, but the Head of Student Research (Chris Foster) was EPQ Co-ordinator and ran the taught course. I was just starting to get involved with providing more targeted support for that when we left to come to Blanchelande College on Guernsey in September 2021. By October 2021 I was appointed the EPQ Co-ordinator at Blanchelande, which had only opened its Sixth Form the year before, and was in its first year of the EPQ. In September 2023 we also started the HPQ. Our cohort is currently extremely small, ranging from 2-5 EPQ students our of a year group of 8-12 Y12s, and 4-8 HPQ students out of a cohort of around 50 Y10s, but I fully expect it to grow as our new Sixth Form develops and expands, and as new Y10 students start to understand the new HPQ qualification better.

Although I have had a very steep learning curve, going from almost no experience of the Projects Qualifications to being Co-ordinator for a group that needed to finish their EPQs within about four months of me taking over, the small but growing cohorts have been an ideal opportunity to develop my understanding of the best way to support these students. My Extended Essay background was ideal preparation, but did shape my initial mindset in ways I am only now beginning to understand (particularly given I was neither a Supervisor or the Co-ordinator for the EE), and of course the FOSIL framework is the perfect foundation for supporting these inquiry-based qualifications.

Over the next few days or weeks, my plan is to write a few short posts to pull together the insights I have had over the last few years about supporting these qualifications, based on my particular journey. As always, I am aware that I have a long way to go still. This kind of public reflection is an opportunity for me to develop my own practice and to get better – it would be super if some of you would join the conversation and add ideas, insights, questions and examples of your own practice. That way we can learn from each other and get better together.

[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.

[Elizabeth Hutchinson Participant]

Thanks for sharing your thoughts Jenny. I often tell the librarians I train, not to put too much into one lesson. It is far better for our students to learn one thing well than a lot of nothing. I like the idea of giving students time to try out what you have just shown them whilst you are still there to support them. It helps to link what they have just learnt with what they are now doing… which is essential when they come across another piece of research in another part of the curriculum.

[Jenny Toerien Keymaster]

It has taken me far too long to return to this topic – and much has evolved in my EPQ and HPQ teaching over that time. Not least, I have switched my teaching of citing and referencing from using the tools in Word to using the online tool Zotero (Zo-TER-o). Since the implications of that go far beyond Projects Qualifications, I have made a new Topic for it here.

However, in the original spirit of this Topic I wanted to continue with lessons I have learnt over the years from teaching the HPQ and EPQ. I am now teaching my third HPQ cohort (and sixth EPQ), following a number of years supporting the IB EE, and every year that support evolves based on lessons I have learnt from the previous cohort.

Lesson 2: Even independent learning qualifications (and coursework) need regular homework to be set and checked

It’s easy to think that because the EPQ and HPQ are independent qualifications, students need to be entirely free to organise the pace of their own work so we shouldn’t set ‘homework’ as such because that will interfere with their ability to organise their own time. In the early days of supporting the Projects Qualifications I was wary of setting work because I worried that it would leave students no time to follow their plans. I have come to realise both that there are certain tasks that everyone needs to get done, so setting clear deadlines throughout the process makes sure these are not rushed at the end, and that if I don’t set weekly homework on Teams it is harder for students to remember and prioitise their EPQ/HPQ work among all the other subjects that are setting regular homework deadlines.

I now set a Teams assignment every week for both EPQ and HPQ. Sometime this does just say ‘Follow your plan for this week’, but some weeks it will also include points like:

• ‘Make sure your source evaluation chart is up-to-date’
• or ‘Make a list of the main points in your argument and note how many ‘for’ and ‘against’ sources you have for each’.
• or ‘Check your plan is up to date and that you have been monitoring your progress’

I find it is not effective if I always include the same tasks. Students take (for example) updating their source evaluation charts more seriously if I ask them to do this specifically every now and then, rather than leaving it on a ‘to do every week’ list. It also helps if I follow up by checking that it has been done! Of course at certain points the homework will also include Production Log deadlines. Some weeks we will end a lesson with a quick (written) reality check, where I ask students to check their own plans, see if they are up-to-date and list their main priorities for that week.

All this seems obvious from a teaching perspective – students do their homework when it is Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Timed (and when there is accountability). From a Projects/ Coursework perspective we often leave those same students to their own devices for long periods and are then surprised when we get to the end and they haven’t been keeping up with their work – and sometimes end up with huge amounts to do at the last minute.

How many adults have the discipline to always make regular time every week for a long-term project that we know is only due in a year’s time, alongside a bunch of urgent tasks that are due tomorrow or next week (and that we know others will be clamouring for if we don’t do them)?

We all function better with smaller tasks and relatively short deadlines – and part of the Projects Qualifications is teaching students how to break a larger project down to achieve this. We shouldn’t expect them to immediately have the maturity to ‘just get on with it’ by themselves without regular accountability – and accountability isn’t just a quick ‘how are you getting on?’ check-in every now and then which is easy to blag. We should be expecting to see tangible evidence of progress, while recognising that long-term inquiry can appear to happen in fits and starts as it requires thinking time, during which tangible evidence can sometimes seem sparse.

I would also note that it seems to me to be common for subject teachers in subjects with a coursework component that runs alongside a taught (examined) component to set students going and then leave them to it without regular accountability checks. This is really challenging for students to manage alongside other, more pressing, homework demands and it is unsurprising that under these circumstances some students leave the coursework to the last minute and struggle with issues such as plagiarism and AI use. In that respect even something as basic as the Projects Qualifications Production Log would offer more structure.

I would be interested to hear from others: How do you introduce regular accoutability into your EPQ / HPQ / coursework without compromising students’ independence?

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