A Guided Inquiry Approach to High School Research

GI

Tascha Folsoi

Schmidt, R. K. (2013). A guided inquiry approach to high school research. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC CLIO.

Summary
Prior to my last post, I searched compassion and something about teaching the research process.  I came upon this beautiful article, Structured Comprehensiveness and Compassion in Guided Inquiry (Giordano & Schmidt,  2014)describing the approach laid out in the book above.  I was very drawn to their description of twenty-two workshops designed to take students through the inquiry process.

In this series of workshops, students are first asked to identify their learning style by writing a brief essay in which they describe a time they enjoyed learning something in class, a time they enjoyed learning something on their own, and a time they had to learn something under pressure and succeeded.

After a series of workshops, their next written assignment is to write a proposal defending their topic and their sources.  Students are guided through the original stages of narrowing their topic as they are introduced the the final product, a five minute presentation with realia.  Rather than an abstract pyramid in which they must narrow their research question, they are guided toward thinking of a topic that would make an interesting presentation within a five minute time frame.

They are also carefully guided through the process of taking notes on their research.  Ultimately, they are required to take notes on at least 45 notecards.  Eventually, they are guided through the process of sorting these notecards into categories, generating an outline from these categories in a card sort process much like the one we learned to conduct in 202, and identify gaps in their outline.  From there, they find additional information and delete information that would not lend itself to an interesting 5 minute presentation.  There are reflections built into the process as well as a buddy system to provide feedback throughout.    There is no element of the Big Think process that is left untouched in this books.  I highly recommend it and her other books to any high school librarian.  They are both structured and constructivist.  Transformative for me! I will use this as a semester long project with teachers at my school, unlike the intensive 12 weeks set forth in the timeline in the book.  Ultimately, I hope her books will prepare me to teach the AP Capstone Research class.    I find this work very exciting.

References

Giordano, E. E., & Schmidt, R. p. (2014). Structured comprehensiveness and compassion in guided inquiry. School Library Monthly, 30(7), 30-32.