Inquiry Project Conundrum

 It's the "winter break" - which of course means that I'm still thinking about school. It always takes me several days to reset my brain.

Last week, I wrote about my collaborative partner classes. That's only part of my teaching assignment. I provide prep coverage to several in-person and virtual classes, for a variety of subjects. I teach health, media, "library", "problem solving", and social studies. 

I am a teacher-librarian, and I teach social studies. A huge chunk of the social studies curriculum in Ontario is based on the inquiry process. It's a natural fit, but natural doesn't equal easy.

Recently, I was pretty pleased with myself because I designed a controlled inquiry project for my Grade 1 and my Grade 2 students. I don't like inquiry projects that generate cookie cutter responses. I also don't like inquiry projects that lack critical thinking components, because then it's too easy to plagiarize content. I'm influenced by Carol Koechlin's Ban Those Bird Units and Trevor Mackenzie's Dive Into Inquiry. I was convinced that by now, four months in, the students would be ready for this type of task.

I've been working with these students online since September. It's not been easy. Many of them are at the early stages of their reading potential, so requiring written work was something I try to shy away from as frequently as I can. It took them a long time to become familiar with different sorts of file types (e.g. a Jamboard, a Google Slides deck, etc.) Attempting to schedule semi-private oral interviews with every student took a very, very long time, especially when I only have three forty-minute periods with them per week. 

Hello and thank you FlipGrid for providing part of a solution. I've done a few mini-tasks with the students to get them comfortable with the web-based, platform-agnostic video-posting tool. Most of them have figured out how to post a clip. Using FlipGrid meant that I could listen/watch the students outside of class and I have a better idea about how much is their own work. Part of the sharing for this inquiry project will involve a FlipGrid video.

For the Grade 1s, the unit theme is "Our Changing Roles and Responsibilities". I was actually inspired by one of the prompts in the actual expectations to help formulate this question template to guide their investigations: "Are you a better X or Y?" The goal is for them to compare two roles that they currently hold. There is no right or wrong answer. Here is my process outline I posted, as well as the single-point rubric that will be used to assess the project.

We also brainstormed the different roles that the students have and created a list of the actions a person good at that role would exhibit. (The snippets I snagged to show here on the blog do not show the entire list. Other roles include "friend", "member of a religion", "team member", and "pet owner".)

I was checking in with the students during class to see how they were progressing with their inquiry. I asked some of them to tell me about their personal inquiry question.

"My question is 'Am I a better chef or a driver?'", declared one student.

"My question is 'Am I a better sister or a ninja?", announced another student.

A third student showed me their Google document, where they are to write their question, and the sentence read: "Am I a better friend". 

I had to reiterate that we were supposed to pick TWO roles that we CURRENTLY held, so we could compare. Thankfully, other students selected roles that are part of their identities.

For the Grade 2s, their unit theme is "Changing Family and Community Traditions". We've already conducted family interviews as well as peer interviews, which was the inquiry prompt for this grade. Instead, the inquiry question I used was "How many different ways can we sort five holidays?" Here is the steps they need to take to complete the inquiry project, and the assessment rubric.

I'm trying not to compare the in-person Grade 2s to the virtual Grade 2s, but when I do, I worry about the online students. Mrs. Commisso's Grade 2 students were able to research several different holidays and use subtopics to organize their information. They used Jamboards and Google Slides and paper graphic organizers to sort and share their facts. I've simplified the task for the virtual Grade 2s. They only need to share one fact from each holiday, and they were allowed to select up to four holidays that they were already familiar with for their comparisons. We learned about a couple of holidays (Divali, Boxing Day) together. Despite this reduction, I'm really worried that many of the students are not going to be successful and I'm not sure what to do to support them even more than I already have. This is not to say that everyone in the class is lost. There are several students who have embraced the mini-lessons on making a chart and have developed several charts comparing their holidays. Once again, I'm not asking for a lot of writing; I just want evidence of original thinking. 

This will be the last big assignment dedicated for this unit of study. I hope that my inquiry project was not too ambitious and that students will be able to demonstrate that they have learned a little something during our time together. Fingers crossed!