On 9 March 2024, Elizabeth Hutchinson and I met for the Ninth in our ongoing monthly discussion about education, school libraries and FOSIL-based inquiry. Listen here.
Hello, Jannath.
I would make the focus developing engaged and empowered inquirers over Years 7-9.
This would allow you to use the Portrait of an Engaged and Empowered Inquirer at Year 6 (see below) as a starting point for Year 7.
You would then be able to use the Portrait of an Engaged and Empowered Inquirer at Year 9 (see below) and the Portrait Attributes Developed Through Inquiry in Years 7-9 (see below) to frame their development over this time according to your specific circumstances, and bearing in mind that the skills listed in the Portrait Attributes Developed Through Inquiry in Years 7-9 – which link to Empire State Information Fluency Continuum graphic organisers – are indicative, and not prescriptive.
In terms of the inquiry process, the FOSIL Inquiry Cycle Skills Sets (see below) could be helpful in identifying a more specific focus for each year, as could the FOSIL Priority Skills in Transition Years (see below).
For example, our Year 9 Interdisciplinary Signature Work Inquiry at Blanchelande College has developed as its specific focus reading and reasoning within each stage of the inquiry process, which requires use of and reference to reliable sources, with a view to an oral presentation and Q&A for their GCSE English Language NEA. This is different to the Year 9 Individual Project that we developed at Oakham School, which had as its specific focus formally presented persuasive/ argumentative writing based on evidence uncovered in reliable sources in response to a personal inquiry question formulated by each student.
The Signature Work inquiry, or equivalent, in Year 9 serves, then, as a culminating project.
Portrait Attributes Developed Through Inquiry in Years 7-9 (PDF download).
FOSIL Inquiry Cycle Skill Sets | Download as PDF or PNG
FOSIL Priority Skills in Transition Years (PDF download)
Thanks, Elizabeth, and congratulations, Jannath – your extraordinary journey with FOSIL continues.
I have some thoughts on the curriculum/ framework/ plan, but will need to return to this towards the end of the week.
In relation to introducing FOSIL to staff, some of the FOSIL Presentations might be helpful, especially those we developed for INSET at Oakham School and, more recently, Blanchelande College.
Your responsibility for staff research is exciting. Although we lost touch with our colleague, Chris Foster, when we left Oakham School, he was promoted to a similar role to yours, and we had begun to discuss the topic of student research. He shared some of his early thoughts in the following post before we left Oakham, which may be helpful: Making Sense of Evidence in Education. I have some further thoughts on this, which I will share as soon as I am able.
My apologies for not updating this:
Elizabeth and I next meet on Saturday 9 March 2024.
I have been meaning to return to and develop this post, and hope to have an opportunity to do so soon.
In the meantime, I want to briefly update the direct instruction Vs inquiry debate with some more recent articles, and note two things:
The articles below are listed in reverse chronological order, which I will add to:
The polemic against inquiry is ‘grounded’ in evidence drawn from the field of cognitive science, but this ground is less stable than it appears. This is explored very accessibly in the following blog post by Matthew Evans (a headteacher): Evans, M. (2024, February 13). Is CogSci in education a surging wave? Retrieved from Matthew Evans: https://educontrarianblog.com/2024/02/13/is-cogsci-in-education-a-surging-wave/
Evans’ blog post was prompted by the following blog post by Christian Anderson, which is also worth reading:
Hello, Elizabeth. No, not yet. The book has gone from the commissioning editors to the series editor, who was supposed to get our chapters to us by Christmas for final editing, but I have not yet received mine. The intention was to have it ready by the middle of the year.
Sorry for the delay in replying, Ruth, and we are so pleased that you are back in touch.
Yes, this is the dilemma that our profession finds itself in and, based on my slowly growing understanding of UK school library history, I think to some extent has created for itself. Now, where to start…?
Please persevere, because your students, your classroom colleagues and your professional colleagues need you.
Excellent news, Elizabeth – we will look forward to your session.
I continue (and collate) my series – Between the Library and the Classroom: Becoming Integral to the Educational Process – for The School Librarian, the Quarterly Journal of the School Library Association.
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The School Librarian, Volume 71, Number 4, Winter 2023
Following the SLA Enterprise of the Year Award <tinyurl.com/4v9vpxyj>, we travelled to the IASL Annual Conference in Rome. This provided a further opportunity to demonstrate theoretically and practically how the school library/ian becomes integral to the educational process through its inquiry-centred instructional program as outlined in the IFLA School Library Guidelines, which included demonstrating how inquiry, and specifically ESIFC/FOSIL-based inquiry, counters all four debilitating tendencies that rob inquiry of its educational potency <tinyurl.com/yc23e5yt>. I then presented my chapter – Digital Literacy: Necessary but Not Sufficient for Life-Wide and Life-Long Learning – for an upcoming IFLA book at the World Library and Information Congress in Rotterdam. This provided an opportunity to argue further that a library/ian-centred educational process in school makes school integral to broader efforts to strengthen the “reality-based community” of “error-seeking inquirers” (Rauch, 2021) on which liberal democracy depends <tinyurl.com/u4m47m3j>. This – a school library/ian integral to the educational process, and an educational process integral to strengthening the fabric of democratic society – requires the school library/ian to understand themself as “a teacher whose subject is learning itself” (Knight, 1968).
This, by and large, is not who we currently are as a profession, although it could be who we aspire to be, given suitable inspiration. This makes the recent SLA publication of Making School Libraries Integral to the Educational Process: An Introduction to the IFLA School Library Guidelines especially timely, given (1) the inspirational and aspirational force of the Guidelines, which derives from more than 50 years of international research into the effectiveness of school libraries, and (2) a widespread and growing concern with the instructional identity of a school librarian, or lack thereof, which the Guidelines treat as of fundamental importance.
Lance and Kachel (2021) recently lamented mounting school librarian job losses, often motivated on financial grounds but more broadly driven by a disconnect between school librarianship and education. Davies (1979), perhaps more prophetically than she intended, warned:
Because [of the] persistent downgrading of education, the profession itself must make a value judgment as to which criticisms from without the profession and which criticisms from within it are justified. Having identified the legitimate criticisms, the profession must then painstakingly set about to correct what is wrong, to strengthen what is weak, and to safeguard what is excellent. “The whole aim is to lift the critique from a set of complaints to a set of purposes” (Barzun, 1978). Only then can a plan for action be formulated and disaster, always lurking in the wings, be forestalled.
The revolution will not be televised.
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The FOSIL Group is an international community of educators who frame learning through inquiry, which is a stance and process aimed at building knowledge and understanding of the world and ourselves in it as the basis for responsible participation in society.
This is a fascinating glimpse into how you are positioning the systematic and progressive development of engaged and empowered inquirers over the course of six years, which lays a strong foundation for secondary school, and this is exactly the kind of deep thinking combined with visionary planning that we need.
Your emphasis on questioning in all Years reminds me of the following two quotations, which, if kept clearly in mind, guide us well in our work with our students:
Being given permission to have/ ask questions, and then being willing and increasingly able to explore answers to the most fruitful of those questions, is essential for learning, and is the work of a lifetime.
To clarify, students in Years 1-6 have one 50-minute library lesson every 2 weeks? Is this for the whole academic year? Have they started yet? Have you given any thought yet to what the respective culminating products in Express might be, given the rich possibilities that you have created?
I am looking forward to an opportunity to discuss this in greater detail.
Thanks for separating the topics, Jannath – I was going to suggest that.
Thoughts on your initial post:
This leads to thoughts on your second post:
Perhaps the most versatile graphic organiser, given the points above, will be some form of the Investigative Journal, which we have adapted for use in primary and secondary (both versions available in Resources), and I include an example below from our Year 9 Signature Work inquiry:
This could be easily simplified and, clearly, there are a range of skills implicit in this example, such as having been able to find the information that I am now working with.
We have chosen APA to base our referencing style on, mainly because at a school level it is essentially the same as Harvard (which is very common), it is simpler than MLA, it is available in Word (which we use in school), and it is the standard style we use for HPQ (Year 10) and EPQ (Year 12/13). This is how it is currently worded in our draft Academic Integrity Policy (which is adapted from the Framework of Skills):
I hope that this help you somewhat in moving this exciting and important project forwards.
Our induction session raised a point of clarification and a question, which I share here from the perspective of building a community of inquiry.
Clearly, not all learning needs to happen through an inquiry involving all six stages in the process. However, it is difficult to imagine any learning that does not involve one or more of the stages. Having said that, students will not fully develop as engaged and empowered inquirers if they never experience a full inquiry involving all six stages of the process in each of our disciplines. The reason for this is that inquiry is a fundamental human response to reality – What! Why? I have been thinking about this in Whitehead’s* terms of there being only one subject-matter for education, which is life in all its manifestations (p. 10), which our students encounter in school primarily as subjects/ academic disciplines. Elsewhere, he says:
“From the very beginning of their education, the child should experience the joy of discovery. The discovery which they have to make, is that general [conceptual] ideas give an understanding of that stream of events which pours through their life, which is their life.” (p. 3)
This is why we pursue disciplinary knowledge from a stance of wonder and puzzlement, and in an interdisciplinary way, because the manifestations of life/ reality ought to cohere meaningfully, and we have an important opportunity/ responsibility to facilitate this.
X’s question about making Rosenshine and FOSIL-based inquiry explicit in our planning – with important distinctions between medium term planning and individual lesson plans – was in part addressed by Y’s observation on the similarities between quality direct teaching as formulated by Rosenshine and a guided inquiry approach. This is the reason why Tytler’s article is so important, because his table expresses Rosenshine’s principles in terms of an inquiry stance and process, so any explicit occurrence of one or more of Rosenshine’s principles is also potentially a meaningful occurrence of its inquiry equivalent, and vice versa. While these ‘principles’ can’t be neatly assigned to stages in the inquiry process, they may indicate which stage(s) is involved. For example, while Tap into students current/prior knowledge including from previous learning will always be a feature of Connect [and the start of an inquiry], it would likely also be the starting point for a lesson/ series of lessons just focusing on the Construct stage of the inquiry process [because students can’t build knowledge and understanding from nothing in Construct, which is why it follows on from Investigate].
As Z pointed out, this all gives us great flexibility in how together we go about enabling our individual students to develop as engaged and empowered inquirers within our disciplinary communities of interdisciplinary knowledge – a journey of heroic inquiry that we are always making with them.
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*”Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) was a British mathematician and philosopher best known for his work in mathematical logic and the philosophy of science. … Although there are important continuities throughout his career, Whitehead’s intellectual life is often divided into three main periods. The first corresponds roughly to his time at Cambridge from 1884 to 1910. It was during these years that he worked primarily on issues in mathematics and logic. It was also during this time that he collaborated with Russell [notably on the Principia Mathematica]. The second main period, from 1910 to 1924, corresponds roughly to his time at London. During these years Whitehead concentrated mainly on issues in physics, the philosophy of science, and the philosophy of education. The third main period corresponds roughly to his time at Harvard from 1924 onward. It was during this time that he worked primarily on issues in metaphysics.”
From <https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/whitehead/>
Whitehead reference: Whitehead, A. N. (1929). The Aims of Education and Other Essays. New York, NY: Macmillan.
On 11 November, Elizabeth Hutchinson and I met for the fifth in our ongoing monthly discussion about education, school libraries and FOSIL-based inquiry.
The recording of this discussion is freely available here on Elizabeth’s site.
I have only just realised that I have not explained what a Signature Work is, or where the idea comes from, which I will do at greater length when time permits.
In the meantime, this is essentially how we present it our students:
Thank you, Elizabeth, and Jannath for sharing the extraordinary progress that you have made since introducing yourself to us in the Forum a little over six months ago!
I have read your post with great interest and hope to have time to reply within the next couple of days.