Hey friends, we're back and this time because of some... Hey friends, we're back. It is June, can you believe it? And with June comes the end of school. And with the end of school comes a lot of scheduling issues. So I unfortunately had to push off some, nope. Hey friends, we're back and it is June. I can't believe it's June. I can't believe we've done as many episodes as we have done. I am so grateful to all the folks who have shared.
And as we're in June and we're heading into the end of school, lots of folks have lots of stuff on their plates. So I wasn't able to connect with guests for this week, but didn't want to leave you hanging. And I happen to have a couple of lessons in my back pocket that maybe folks might find interesting. So I figured I would bring one and share it with you.
So this is a lesson that I actually created for a class called Argument and Debate, which I was asked to write the curriculum for and then I ended up teaching for a couple of years. And it was a one -marking period long class. So I had 36 classes, 36 50 -minute class periods with students. And over that time, I taught them how to... do lots of research and how to use their research to build good arguments, how to examine other people's arguments.
So it was really a lot of information literacy and media literacy and news literacy going on wrapped up in the guise of we're gonna do debates. So in these many, many lessons, I've shared these out lots of times and you're all more than welcome to have all the lessons in whatever method you like them. I've shared them out before and just ask if you haven't seen them, because I'll be happily sharing them out again, but.
There's one that I thought might be kind of useful that I think is easy to get skipped over. And so this is planning and visualizing. So a lot of times I think when we get students to do research, first our students tend to confuse search and research. They tend to think that those are, those two things are the same thing and they're really not. We know they're not, but they don't always know they're not.
So we've got to take that step back and say, look, just because you type it into the computer doesn't mean that you're actually doing research. Let's think about how we're going to do this. And I like to take my students a step further back and say, before you even begin to type anything into a computer, you should really take some time to try and think through what is it that you're actually going to be looking for?
Because so often I've seen students dive into research with, maybe a vague idea of where they're trying to go. Most often not. They might have a question or a topic that they're trying to find out about, but they tend to just sort of go in sort of shooting from the hip and hoping that they come across something that's useful. So I have created a lesson that I used to use with my argument debate students on planning and visualizing.
And I've used this lesson with other classes since then, when I've gone into talk about research with different classes as the school librarian and... When students get it, it really helps them move their research forward in a really productive way. So I like to remind them that before you can even research, we've got to think about the fact that there is so much info out there. Just jumping online and just doing a random open web search, there's too much information.
Most of the time, if you have them do a search, pick any term you want and have them do a search, they're gonna get millions, hundreds of millions. I've even seen billions with a B of results come up. That's too much. There's no way a human could look through all of that information. So what we need to do is search smarter and not harder.
And I love to give them a little video embedded in the lesson that shows different times people have failed to plan and therefore they have basically planned to fail because they haven't thought ahead and really gone through all the possibilities and kind of figured out where could this go off the rails. It's a really fun little video. It's short, it's only a couple of minutes long. And there's a couple of other videos that I like to share with them sometimes too.
They're in the slide deck as well. But I try to get them to focus on three main actions. First, I want them to think. I want them to just stop and think about what is it you're trying to accomplish. Because if you say, I want to research football, well, what about football do you want to know? If you're doing inquiry research into football, I imagine you know something. So what is it specifically that you're trying to get at?
And I ask them when they're thinking about where are you trying to get to with your research, what do you see in your mind's eye? What is the perfect end result of all the search that you're gonna do? What do you imagine? a great result would look like. Not that you know what the answer is to that question, but in terms of format, in terms of style, in terms of presentation.
Because if you can think about what you want to be able to look at when you're all said and done searching, that can help you narrow down where you go searching and what you're searching for. So it can be really productive to take a minute and just imagine, okay, when I'm all said and done and I get to the end of my search process, this is the kind of thing that I would really like to have. And then I asked them to think about how can we plan to get from where we are to where we want to be?
Because if we can, if we know what the end point is and we know where we're starting from, we can at least make some educated guesses about some of the steps in between. And again, that can help us shorten up the research process. So although these steps come before typing anything in, and it may seem like they're adding time to the research process, they're actually cutting down the time that's going to be spent researching.
because it's going to get the kids right to what they're looking for when they finally use some of this stuff to go searching. So we talk about these different ideas. We talk about how they can be really specific with them. And I actually made a couple of short videos to help them think about what visualizing really means.
And I actually made these back in grad school for a practice lesson that ended up being part of my regular instruction, because I was like, this is actually something really important for our students to be able to think about. So this is a short video that talks about when you visualize, here are some things to consider. You want to think about what's the, what information, what is the information you're looking for going to look like? What kind of information are you looking for? Is it years?
Is it dates? Is it facts about a person? Is it a general overview? All of these are different types of information that are going to be located in different places. What format might you want your information to be in? If you know you want a video, You probably don't want to do an open web search. You probably want to go to a video service. How much information are you trying to gather? Are you looking for lots and lots of things? Meaning you need to look at several different sources?
Are you trying to just get a quick summary? Maybe that's one really reliable source can give you that, right? So having these kinds of things in mind before we even begin starts to narrow down the search. Who or what kind of group might have the information that you're looking for?
because if we can think about the fact that, I know I want information about animals, okay, that cuts out a whole lot of possible places that you could go looking online and really narrows it into, let's think about where are some reliable sources that have some animal information that I could go to that are gonna help me get right to what I'm looking for without having to waste time looking at stuff that's not gonna be as relevant and not gonna be as reliable.
So who might have the information and is there any special vocabulary I might need to think about? Now, for students and I work with middle grade students on this. So that can be a difficult thing because they may not know if they're specialized vocabulary. But if they do know that they're specialized vocabulary that can help to start channeling what they're going to look for can help them find those key terms more readily and more easily.
So we want to try and get them thinking and visualizing seeing in their minds what they think might come up. And last but not least in visualizing. We want to try and encourage them to think about how can you maybe limit what you're looking for. If you know you don't want information from before the 1980s, you can make that part of your search strategy so that you're not looking at a bunch of older information. You can say, I only want information from the past year or the past week.
And these are really easy things to limit either in a database or even in an open web search. But we've got to be aware of it. We've got to think about it. And we've got to practice. figuring out what are those limits and then how do I actually create those limits on my searches. So this is just sort of the pre -planning, right? Getting us to the state where we're thinking about very specifics, very specific details about what we're gonna try and track down.
And then we also want to think about planning. So everything we've done up to here is visualizing, we're imagining, and we're trying to imagine a path. to get to useful information. And then once we've kind of thought about what it might look like, we wanna start thinking about, okay, so how do I get from where I am to that end goal? How do I use this visualization that I've done to actually put together a plan? And so when we plan, we wanna think about what is the query that I have?
What is my information need? That's the real specific thing beyond, football, we want a question that we're trying to answer, because that's going to help us really get right to a point. We also need to think about facets. We need to think about what are the main words or the main phrases that are associated with my query. When I take my query, when I take my question and I cut out all but the most essential words, what's left?
What are those maybe two or three or maybe four key words that are so incredibly important? Students have a really hard time figuring out what their facets are when we do searches. And we as librarians probably use the term facets in queries regularly in our thoughts and in our processes, but students don't know those terms necessarily.
And they have a hard time differentiating what's the difference between typing a sentence into Google and having a question that I pull facets out of to use for a search. So helping them see what those things are, understand what those things are, and kind of pull them apart a little bit. can help them get to those results that are gonna be most useful faster.
Adds to their understanding of how search works and also adds to their understanding of their topic because they're really having to think carefully about what are those key words and phrases, right? So we've got our question that we want the answer to, our query. We've got our key words and phrases, which are our facets. And then we think about synonyms. If we can pull out our synonyms for our different facets. I've got my key words.
are there any synonyms that might be useful when I do my search? Because if I'm gonna search for my keywords, maybe not everybody's going to refer to things in the same way I do. So can I come up with, or can I find by using a thesaurus, another skill, can I find or think of some synonyms for my facets? So armed with those pieces of information, we are now able to do a much more effective search.
Knowing what those things are is one thing, but we've got to help the students also practice those things. We've got to help them take a, create a query, take it apart, figure out what the facets are. We've got to help them visualize, think through what is it that we're trying to see when this is all said and done. It's not a natural thing for a lot of our students. I would argue it's not a natural thing for just about anybody.
We as information professionals might understand why this is a better technique, but most people are going to just kind of dive in and hope that they find what they're looking for. We know that there's a better way to do it, but we've got to remind them. We've got to make sure that they're clear on here's how to do it and here's why you want to do it.
So I walk the students through all of this and we actually do a couple of practice runs and I give them a, an argument and debate proposition, an idea that they're going to try either attack or defend. Right. So we start with if your proposition is in -person school should be replaced with remote school. So this obviously coming about during and after the pandemic. I tell the students you should have more than just one query for this.
If that's what you're trying to defend, in -person school should be replaced with remote school. You've got to come up with some arguments, some reasons why. So what are some of the reasons, student, you might have for yes or no? for this proposition, right? And come up with, here are the reasons that I've got.
When you've got arguments, reasons, then you can start looking at how we take those arguments apart to create queries, how we can take the queries apart to look at facets, how we can find synonyms to go with those facets. So again, I give them the example.
If one of your arguments for in -person school should be replaced by remote school, if you're gonna argue that's true, Maybe one of the arguments could be remote school allows more students to participate in class because being remote, well, I'm not going to say why right away, but maybe that's one of the ideas I have in my head, right? Now I've got to figure out why might that be true? So then I've got at least one query for me to think about. What are the ways students participate in class?
That's a query that goes directly with that argument. If remote school allows more students to participate in class, well, how is that true? What are the ways students can participate? There's also, other queries that obviously could go there. But that's one that we can start with. And I can say, OK, so we've got the query. What are ways students participate in class? Now I look for my facets, right? So I want to think about students. I want to think about participate.
Those are kind of my key phrases, my key terms that I'm going to use when I start doing my search to help me understand what are the ways students participate in class. Then I want to look at some synonyms. So like participate. Okay, that's one of my key words. Maybe participate. We're talking about engage. Maybe we're talking about take part in. Maybe we're talking about engage with. I already said engage. That's okay. We can look at how we come up with different synonyms.
We can think about it. We can look them up online and see what do we come up with. And so I usually give the students a graphic organizer to help them sort of think about how they're going to assemble this. And the graphic organizer that I give them, comes with a pre -made proposition and they just pick a side, pro or con, and then they figure out at least two or three arguments that they could use to prove their side makes sense. And then they do some queries.
What are some questions that are gonna help me answer these arguments? And then there's a section for, okay, what are my facets from these different queries I came up with? What are the synonyms? And then they can just list them right out. And then there's, that's our planning section. Then for the visualizing section, I've got them answering some questions about what does it look like? Who or what might be our reliable sources to think about? Experts that we might be able to think of.
Are there any specialized vocab that we want to think about? What reliable sources that I've used before might be good to use again? What limits can I put on what I'm looking for? So having them go through this graphic organizer, gets them to put these things into practice so that they're not just coming at it for the first time when they've actually got a project, right? So that this way they're seeing how the system all fits together.
And then when they get to their own inquiry I give them a blank graphic organizer to put their proposition into and have them do planning and visualizing so that they can start applying it to their own research. And I'll be honest, some kids just don't see it. They don't see the value. They think it takes too long. And then they flounder when they go to do their research and they get frustrated that their research isn't going well. The kids that get it, get it.
And the kids that get it tend to find better research. They tend to have better arguments. They tend to have a much clearer idea of where they're trying to go when it's time for them to share, here's what I found and here's why I thought it was good information. So I'm not gonna try and convince you that every student is gonna see this right away. but the more they use it, the more they start to go, wait a minute, huh, that did save me some time on the backend.
So it's sort of a, one of the ways I try and explain this to the students is you're gonna have to spend time researching. You can spend time on the backside after you've tried to do some research and gotten frustrated and haven't quite found what you need. And then you have to read through a bunch of sources to kind of figure out what is it I'm even looking for.
And then eventually you'll get refined and refined and refined to a good search or, You can spend that time in the front end, think about it more carefully, get much more reliable and much faster results for the searches you're gonna do. So that is sort of the lesson in a nutshell. And the slides are gonna be in the show notes. So you're more than welcome to check those out. You're more than welcome to use them, modify them, use them for your, whatever's gonna work for you.
They're definitely tailored to the class I was teaching. So you may need to go in and make some changes. Nothing wrong with that. You're more than welcome to. I will say that I did get some very good feedback from the teachers whose classes I went into to teach research lessons as the school librarian in talking about this and having some of the teachers hadn't thought about the fact, yeah, we should kind of do some pre -planning when we get to do our research.
Being able to bring them some graphic organizers and explain to the class, like, here's what you should do and here's why, and showing them, a lot of the teacher's eyes kind of lit up a bit too. and they started to change a little bit of what they were doing with their research to make sure that they were incorporating some of these elements to simplify the research process. Because guess what? The teachers get just as frustrated as the kids when the kids can't find what they're looking for.
Because if the kids aren't even sure what they're looking for, the teacher who's walking around and trying to monitor a whole bunch of different students doing research is going to have a real hard time figuring out a way to help those students. But if the students have this pre -made organizer that's already got ideas clearly laid out, it gets a lot easier to kind of help redirect the student to where they're trying to get to. So it helps the teachers and it helps the students.
So something to ponder, something to think about, maybe this is something that can be useful with you and your staff and your students, especially if you've got research skills that you share or research lessons that you do with your students. So there's something that maybe you can take advantage of. We're going to go in a different direction and we're going to get to our book break. And the book I want to share for the book break is 54 Things Wrong with Gwendolyn Rogers by Kayla Carter.
And this came out in 2021 and I read it shortly after it came out. This is a book that I recommend anytime I talk about great books for middle and high school. I always recommend this one. It's one of my top 10. And I really truly feel like every educator should read this book. It should be part of education classes, should be part of the introduction to a school that anybody who works in a school should have to read.
So this book is, it's a fiction story, it's about this girl named Gwendolyn, and she knows that there are 54 things wrong with her. She wants to just be like all the other kids, but she can't because there's 54 things wrong with her. How does she know there's 54 things wrong? Because she saw a piece of mail that came from the school that was addressed to her mom that had... a list of results from different kinds of testing that Gwendolyn took at school.
And it wasn't meant for Gwendolyn to see, but it goes through a list of all these things that Gwendolyn is not able to do well. And it's things like sit still. It's things like pay attention for a long period of time. It's things like redirect attention when she drifts. It's things like not getting too excited. Sometimes she gets too excited and she can't contain herself.
It's things like not being able to follow directions because sometimes she's doing a task and somebody tells her to do something else and she just cannot stop doing the task that she's doing until it's done. And that doesn't always sit well in a school setting where there are specific time constraints for certain things. And so Gwendolyn is always getting in trouble and she's just so sad. She is so sad that she is broken. She's so sad.
that she just can't be like the other kids who can sit there, who can refocus, who can't pay attention, who the teacher's not always yelling at. So she's got this list and she's trying to figure out as a middle grader, trying to figure out what she can do to just be normal like the other kids. And the problem is, part of the problem is her mom is kind of absent.
Her mom has been having addiction issues and while her mom's working on those issues, she's very focused on working on those issues and not as focused on being there for Gwendolyn. So Gwen is a little bit kind of on her own as she's trying to work this through. And she comes to realize that there's another kid in her class who acts a lot like she does, but he doesn't get in trouble. And she notices that in talking with him, he says, yeah, well, you know, I get medicated for my ADHD.
And she says, what's that? He says, well, you know, I've got this thing where, you know, I have trouble sitting still. And so I get medication that helps me to sit still and stay focused. Gwendolyn goes, wait a minute, there's a name for this? It's not just that I'm, it's not just me, and it's not just that I'm broken, like there's an actual answer to what this is. There's medication that might help me. And she tries to get her mom to help, but her mom isn't really buying into it.
And so Gwendolyn kind of is trying to figure out she's struggling with, what do I do? How do I, how do I go about fixing myself? Because again, she thinks she's broken. She's got this piece of paper from the school that says there's 54 things wrong with her. and she's memorized it because it is so heavy on her heart. And it's, this story is so wonderful. It's, it's sad, but it's got a positive drift toward the end.
It still leaves some things open, but it's going in a positive direction for Gwendolyn at the end, which is wonderful. But I think it does such a wonderful job of capturing what it's like for some of our students who maybe aren't. what we would think of as model students who maybe aren't the students who are sitting quietly, focused completely on us, not doing anything until, unless we tell them to. Some educators think that that is what a model student should be.
And honestly, that's sort of the depiction of what a model student is when you look at it in television, when you look at it in movies, when you see it in books. There's certain expectations we have of what a student should be. And students who aren't that tend to... frustrate their teachers, tend to get in trouble at school.
And I think being able to look inside the mind of a kid who might be going through something like that, you know, seeing Gwendolyn's story from the inside, for me, definitely kind of opened my eyes up a bit to some of what I saw going on with my students in school, kind of made me rethink some of my approaches and definitely made me give more grace to some of the kids who might be considered more rambunctious or disruptive, sometimes these things are
beyond their control and they want to be good. They want to fit in. They want to do the things we want them to do. And sometimes they're maybe just not able. And that can weigh on a person's soul. And it's really, it's terribly sad to see Gwendolyn going through this, but it's a great reminder to anybody who works with kids, anybody who works in education that, What we see on the outside is not actually what's on the inside. And the behaviors the kids exhibit sometimes are beyond their control.
Sometimes they're not. I'm not going to excuse every behavior of every kid ever. There's definitely kids who need to work on their social skills, self -control, stamina, all these good things. But we need to bear in mind that a lot of times what we're seeing, as maybe defiance or as disruption is possibly a student's way of coping with too much stimulation, not enough stimulation, their method of trying to get themselves to stay focused, right? Stay on task.
So if you get the chance, it's not a super hard read. It's definitely aimed at a middle grade audience, but it's really lovely. 54 Things Wrong with Gwendolyn Rogers by Kayla Carter. I hope you enjoy it. I hope you check it out. And I think that's it for this week. Hopefully we'll have some new folks for you soon. And in the meantime, I hope you're having a great one. I hope if you haven't ended school yet that you're heading into your summer break soon and that things are going well.
And I guess that's about it. So in the meantime, be good and we'll catch up with you later.