Has been submitted to SLW (School Librarians' Workshop)....look for it in the spring issue.
As I think back to the process of pulling our ideas together to write the article I found I kept returning to the idea of how we model a good collaborative inquiry environment for our students...here are some of my thoughts:
It is important to create an environment where your students feel safe to ask questions. The library is a place where people come to ask questions and to seek answers so we are already bringing students into an inquiry environment when we decide to collaborate with the librarian. As instructors it is important to model our own questioning and as we work in collaborative spaces (whether it be digital or physical) we can build confidence in our students to be comfortable to ask questions. On a note of personal honesty, can we show our students where we struggle with our own lack of understanding and can we be open enough to share that we might not know the answer? Are we using these opportunities as teachable moments? I think we need to take a look at our teaching practices and examine how we use our time. Do we provide environments that provide opportunities for all our students to have a voice for asking and responding to questions? The teaching of difficult texts may provide just the opportunity to build a personal learning community (PLC) for yourself and your students. Michelle Blakely, an English teacher that I work with in my high school, who is quite honest in her self evaluation, knew she was finding Persepolis a little daunting to teach, for a variety of reasons, some being historic, cultural etc. She knew that if she had questions as she was reading and trying to teach the novel, her students would probably be at an even higher level of frustration, and wonderment. Using her questions about the text as a model for developing strategies for asking and responding to questions she decided to set up a google doc to create a collaborative inquiry environment. She felt that if she began a PLC with me we could provide questioning/answer structures that would model, and that might lead to collaborative inquiry dispositions for her students.
Simple. Set up a google doc ...we explain the categories and strategies in the article. It has been a wonderful learning experience for me as I model the use of good sources to answer Michelle's questions.
As I think back to the process of pulling our ideas together to write the article I found I kept returning to the idea of how we model a good collaborative inquiry environment for our students...here are some of my thoughts:
It is important to create an environment where your students feel safe to ask questions. The library is a place where people come to ask questions and to seek answers so we are already bringing students into an inquiry environment when we decide to collaborate with the librarian. As instructors it is important to model our own questioning and as we work in collaborative spaces (whether it be digital or physical) we can build confidence in our students to be comfortable to ask questions. On a note of personal honesty, can we show our students where we struggle with our own lack of understanding and can we be open enough to share that we might not know the answer? Are we using these opportunities as teachable moments? I think we need to take a look at our teaching practices and examine how we use our time. Do we provide environments that provide opportunities for all our students to have a voice for asking and responding to questions? The teaching of difficult texts may provide just the opportunity to build a personal learning community (PLC) for yourself and your students. Michelle Blakely, an English teacher that I work with in my high school, who is quite honest in her self evaluation, knew she was finding Persepolis a little daunting to teach, for a variety of reasons, some being historic, cultural etc. She knew that if she had questions as she was reading and trying to teach the novel, her students would probably be at an even higher level of frustration, and wonderment. Using her questions about the text as a model for developing strategies for asking and responding to questions she decided to set up a google doc to create a collaborative inquiry environment. She felt that if she began a PLC with me we could provide questioning/answer structures that would model, and that might lead to collaborative inquiry dispositions for her students.
Simple. Set up a google doc ...we explain the categories and strategies in the article. It has been a wonderful learning experience for me as I model the use of good sources to answer Michelle's questions.