Year 12 (Grade 11) Interrobang!? Inquiry Course @ Blanchelande College
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The aim of the course was to equip the students for independent study in the sixth form and to introduce skills that many of them would need on their courses. The expectation was that they would need further support in subject specific contexts when they met these skills again later in their courses, but that everyone would at least be starting from the same firm foundation. In choosing the skills to focus on we were aware of time constraints – 3 hours of instruction with 3 hours of homework to practise – and also of resource limitations. Given we were giving them a completely free choice of topic it was unrealistic to expect them all to be able to use library books (there wasn’t time to buy in any specialist stock to cover gaps in our collection, even if this was practical or desirable for a short term project such as this). We therefore decided to focus on using online resources for the Investigate part of the course.
You can download a copy of the scheme of work here. First page shown in image below.
I will post more detail about individual sessions shortly.
Session 1: Not the average child
You can download the presentation I used for this session here.
The key aim of this session was to motivate the course and to get students excited ab
out investigating a topic of their choice. Typically students find having a free choice of topics quite hard – some love it, but many find it paralysing. Before the summer I had had the opportunity to deliver a 30 minute light touch ‘bridging course’ session (part Interrobang, part EPQ) at which we had looked at this image (see right) and they had filled in their own blank version and discussed it with a partner.Some therefore already had a clear idea of what they wanted to investigate but others hadn’t given it another thought since July, so to help them to get started I showed them how to browse some of our subscription databases to find topics that interested them. The advantage of this approach was that they would know right from the beginning that there were readily available, reliable sources of information for their topics. It also highlights a vital part of Connect that is often overlooked in shorter inquiries – consulting background information to get an overview of your topic before developing questions and diving in to the Investigate stage (for example, the Grade 7 (Year 6!) continuum skill “Uses multiple sources to acquire background information and identify key words, important people and organizations, and big ideas”.
For homework they needed to come up with an interesting topic and find an article from one of our databases that related to it.
Focus skills for this session:
- Connect: Develops the ability to find an area of interest in any topic of study by looking for connections to own interests and gaps in prior knowledge
- Connect: Asks, “What about this topic is personally interesting to me and important? What about this topic do I want to pursue when I have an opportunity? Does this topic have implications for future career or college choices?
- Investigate: Uses organizational features of electronic books, databases, online articles and websites (e.g., menu bars, tabs, buttons, links, sidebars, chapter titles, headings and subheadings, abstracts, pull quotes, visuals, boxed information) to locate information to answer research questions [and specifically learns to access our Subscription Databases]
- [Learns to use Microsoft Teams effectively for submitting assignments and receiving feedback]
Session 2: No such thing as a silly question?
You can download the presentation I used for this session here.
Asking good inquiry questions is hard! Students will often start with easy factual questions (with copy and paste answers) and need to be encouraged to broaden these out into more debatable questions. In this case this was a very short inquiry, which for some would lead to an EPQ, so the idea was to help every student to understand the difference between questions with easy factual answers and more complex and interesting questions and to encourage them to start asking the latter. There was no expectation that they would reach ‘answers’ by the end of the inquiry, but the hope was that their curiosity would be stimulated to want to investigate further.
For homework they needed to come up with a list of questions with easy factual answers and a list that were more matters of opinion relating to their topic, choose a question they were interested in and continue their investigation (using an Investigative Journal).
Focus skills for this session:
- Wonder: Creates questions to lead to basic information and, in addition, to information that is more critical, complex, and diverse in perspectives
- Investigate: Takes notes to answer questions by recording key phrases or simple facts, paraphrasing, summarizing, or selecting short segments to quote from multiple and diverse sources
- Investigate: Reflects on notes (perhaps in a reflection column) by asking questions, recording own opinions, challenging, and noting the importance of the idea for the final product
- Investigate: Uses organizational features of electronic books, databases, online articles and websites (e.g., menu bars, tabs, buttons, links, sidebars, chapter titles, headings and subheadings, abstracts, pull quotes, visuals, boxed information) to locate information to answer research questions [and specifically learns to access our Subscription Databases]
Session 3: Cutting the CRAAP
You can download the presentation I used for this session here.
This session was designed to get students broadening their search out to general websites and critically evaluating the sites they found. I based it largely on this CRAAP Testing Presentation that I originally developed four years ago for a Year 9 Chemistry group. It really is a gift that keeps giving, and is a constant reminder to me that if I manage to do something properly the first time (even if it takes a disproportionate amount of time to develop compared to its value in that first use!) it will save me so much time in the long run.Source evaluation is so important and there are many arguments about the best way to teach it (see the forum topic CRAAP and SIFT. Is there something better? and this detailed discussion of the pros and cons of tools like the CRAAP test as part of the forum topic Empowering students to inquire in a digital environment, starting at this post ). I have chosen the CRAAP test, while being fully aware of its limitations. Like inquiry itself, source evaluation isn’t a rote method or checklist but a stance of curiosity and, to an extent, healthy suspicion about the provenance of your information. However, in the same way that the FOSIL cycle and resources scaffold the inquiry process, a ‘checklist’ like CRAAP can scaffold the source evaluation process, which is very challenging when you are new to it because there is so much to consider. Never confuse the scaffolding with the skill being developed. All good scaffolding should be designed to fall away once the skill is secure.
Homework for this lesson was to fully CRAAP test one website to do with their topic and then continue with their investigative journal if they had any time to spare (half an hour isn’t long for a decent CRAAP test, so I wasn’t expecting too much more).
Focus skills for this session:
- Investigate: Evaluates sources for authority, currency, relevance, comprehensiveness, and perspective
- Investigate: Evaluates digital information for authority, credibility, accuracy, comprehensiveness, point of view, and bias
- Investigate: Recognizes difference between sponsored content, opinion-based content, and informational/news content
Session 4: Being part of the conversation
You can download the presentation I used for this session here.
While the skill addressed in this session was citing and referencing, I felt it was vital to focus on the underlying attitudes that make citing and referencing an inevitable necessity rather than an externally imposed burden. I have unashamedly copied the following paragraphs from the article I wrote about this week’s session for the school’s weekly newsletter (which is an important advocacy tool for us as it provides a direct channel of communication with parents):
We talked about finding our voices in ‘the unending dialogue between the living, the dead and the yet-to-be born’ (Astle & Partridge, 2018, p.10) with (academic) integrity. The distinction between academic honesty and academic integrity is an important one, brilliantly explained by John Royce (2020) – ‘[a]cademic integrity is more than the choice of the writer – indeed, it is more, much more, than just about the writer … [it] is doing the right thing because this is you, what you do, who you are, how you behave. Integrity is not having to think about the right course of action, it comes naturally’. We were all agreed that we wanted to be known as men and women of integrity.
One of the first steps is learning how to work honestly with the ideas of others, so we began our journey by learning to use the citing and referencing tools in Word to make our sources clear.
Bibliography
Astle, J., & Partridge, L. (2018). Education for the Enlightenment. In A. Painter, Ideas for a 21st Century Enlightenment (pp. 10-15). London: RSA Action and Research Centre. Retrieved from https://www.thersa.org/reports/ideas-for-a-21st-century-enlightenment
Royce, J. (2020, July 29). The integrity of integrity. Retrieved February 10, 2022, from Honesty, honestly…: https://www.read2live.com/2020 /07/29/the-integrity-of-integrity/
For homework students were asked to produce a bibliography of all the sources they had used so far.
Focus skills for this session:
- Express: Cites all sources used according to standard style formats [and learns to use the tools in Microsoft Word to assist with this]
- Express: Ensures that all completed products are plagiarism-free (
and all visuals and sound are used within copyright provisions– not relevant in this case)
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]
Celebration evening
The celebration evening was amazing and, again, I want to share the school newsletter article with you (with names redacted) because I want to emphasise the importance of this kind of advocacy. It was a huge event for the Library and had a real impact on our profile, the profile of the Sixth Form within the school (which is only in its third year – until September 2020 our school ended at age 16 and students wanting to study for their final two years had to move to a different school), and the profile of the EPQ within the Sixth Form.We combined the poster presentations for the Year 12 Interrobang course (which were very informal – students stood by their posters and the audience circulated round to talk to them about their work) with the formal assessed presentations for our two Year 13 EPQ students. Year 12 and 13 parents, and Year 11 students and parents (who were in the process of making the decision about whether to stay with us for Sixth Form or possibly to move elsewhere) were all invited, along with staff and school trustees (elsewhere these might be known as the governors or the school board). So it functioned as a formal exam assessment, a celebration AND a marketing event (on a number of different fronts!).
I’d love to share photos of the evening too because it was very special, but I can’t share photos of our students here. I have included a photo of the poster display we made in the Library afterwards (with names and photos redacted).
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Newsletter article:
Thursday evening saw another of Blanchelande’s Sixth Form firsts – our first Sixth Form Inquiry Celebration Evening. This exciting and inspiring event saw our Year 13 Extended Projected Qualification students, HR and EK, expertly presenting on their findings and reflections on their year long Extended Project Qualification inquiry journey, as well as Year 12 enthusiastically discussing their Interrobang!? posters with parents, staff, trustees and students. It was an amazing celebration of all the students’ unique interests and journeys, and many of the audience commented on the very wide range of fascinating topics that they had chosen.
HR and EK set the tone at the start of the evening, with their confident and assured presentations. HR dazzled us with her understanding of Kant and Hume as she explored the complex question of the compatibility between free will and determinism, while EK intrigued us with his fascinating exploration of the reasonableness of a variety of competing explanations for Moses’ burning bush experience as he demonstrated a mature ability to sift out the most reputable sources in a topic rife with pseudoscience.
After that, we had the opportunity to view the excellent posters that Year 12 created in their six-week Interrobang!? inquiry course and to chat with them about their experiences of the course. They had produced some very high-quality work in just 3 hours of teaching and 3 hours of independent time, and learnt some important new skills along the way. Prizes were awarded to:
- First prize: EF (Impact of the civil rights movement in America)
- Second prize: CO (Can mental illnesses be used as excuses for violence in society?)
- Third prize: TB (How has the critique of Shakespeare evolved?)
- Most progress: BV (How have things in Catholicism changed?)
Special mention also has to go to HJ for making a special effort to come to exhibit his poster (Ethics of taking photographs in public) despite having had a foot operation the day before.
We are passionate about inquiry because we recognise how it transforms students’ educational journeys – and I know all who attended last night were bowled over by the powerful evidence they saw of this.
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It was an amazing evening and we had some wonderful comments from those who attended. One very senior member of staff wrote to me afterwards that “After an evening meeting the night before and a fairly tough week I can’t say that I was chomping at the bit to come back in for a two hour session, but I enjoyed every minute of the evening – indeed, it revived me. The level of fluency and the confidence the structure and formation you provide the students with really does transform their capacity for learning” and another said that in all his years in education he had never seen anything as astonishing as the expertise and confidence displayed by our EPQ students in their presentations. We also had some super feedback from parents who attended. It definitely worked as an advocacy and marketing tool but, much more importantly, it also made all the students involved feel that they had been part of something really special.
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