No Shhing Here

  The Brainstorm I work with some amazing English teacher colleagues. During last year's remote learning experience, I collaborated with Tonya Buda, an 9th grade teacher, to make writing a research paper as fool-proof as possible. When teaching research writing virtually, we found our lessons to be most successful when everything was in ONE tab - students got lost when they were switching back and forth between windows with a model and their own work.  To combat this, we developed a new writing template that combined all the scaffolded supports on one screen. This method utilizes a table with four columns, one devoted to each of the following: a section or component label, a model, an explanation, and then a blank column for students to type their own work. Here's a link to a table for a simple three paragraph research paper  in Google Docs. I'd strongly encourage you to make a copy of the Doc and reformat it to meet your OWN expectations and reflect the models you've d...

Our district overhauled the ELA and Social Studies curriculums within the last three years. Because school librarians were included on the program committees designing the curriculum units, we were able to specifically infuse Barabra's Stripling's inquiry model as described in the Information Fluency Continuum in the research units designed by the committee. Because the inquiry model is new to many staff members and students, its implementation requires a little bit of a PR campaign to encourage widespread adoption. I think it's helpful to have strong visuals to both promote the model and reinforce the phases during instruction. To facilitate this, I created two series of posters devoted to Stripling's model - both an elementary version and a secondary version.  One of the inquiry bulletin boards I use to promote the process in my building.  In my building, you'll find the posters on hallway bulletin boards, computer lab walls, and classrooms ranging f...

This is a two part series: Part I is a refresher on inquiry based learning models and their alignment to the Common Core. Part II discusses an inquiry driven 8th grade ELA research unit aligned to the Common Core. So I've spent some serious time hating on the Common Core, but over the past year I've come to appreciate many aspects of the new standards (though I continue to abhor any additional testing it's generated). One fantastic aspect of the Common Core is its emphasis on inquiry. Librarians are inquiry experts - it's what we do 24/7. Having the Common Core around helps justify our existence; I'm finding that most classroom teachers are uncomfortable with inquiry based learning, so we're needed now more than ever! Need a little refresher yourself? In this learning model, instead of expecting students to find the “right answer,” students are asked to find appropriate solutions to problems (typically, the problems - aka "questions" - are genera...