Confession

I have a confession to make, when I started this task I did what many of my students do and jumped right in without thinking through the task. As such my first search was in standard Google and was looking for inquiry based learning + medieval Europe. Surprisingly I found a few useful resources, not very surprisingly I got 71,300 hits.

It wasn't until later in the week that I realised that I should have started much more broadly with 'history' and 'middle school learners', instead of jumping right in with such a specific topic.

It's important to note that I didn't expect to find anything useful at all using the standard Google search. I expected to find a few resources posted by teachers including activities but didn't expect to find any research literature. The second hit was a research paper that had some good points. The focus of the paper is on Primary schools but had some fairly good points in regards to planning inquiry based units of work and building questioning in the classroom. It has a small section on teaching about Rome which is why it would have come up.

Liked- the teacher used the term 'exploratorium' as a word to describe her classroom when she had filled it with stimulus for particular units of work.

Didn't like so much- lack of grounding in current literature and also I felt that this teacher had too many pre-conceived expectations about the 'product' which would limit the imaginations of her kids.

Copy of the paper-  http://reflectingeducation.net/index.php?journal=reflecting&page=article&op=viewPDFInterstitial&path[]=23&path[]=24

The diagram above equates 1) enduring understandings as pre-knowledge of the students so the teacher knows what the pre- existing knowledge base of the students are.
2) Central idea- what is the main topic that the class will be exploring?
3) Summative assessment- What have the students learnt so far, what further instruction may they need to come to their own conclusions?
4) Instructional activities- Scaffolding from the teacher to help students reach those higher order thoughts.
5) Formative assessments- Did the students reach the desired level of knowledge?

 Although I don't intend to use this paper as part of my research review as I feel it lacks real substance and doesn't discuss any recent literature of inquiry based learning, it was still interesting to see what can pop up in a normal google search.

 Kuhlthau's ISP model-
For the initiation aspect of this task I was off with flying colours and I had a really good idea already about the types of things I should be looking for. The readings that Mandy had given us helped me to zone in on the kinds of appropriate resources and 'key words' I should be looking for but I'm still having to look too closely at resources before I keep or discard them.

My focus has been selected but I'm not feeling the optimism that Kuhlthau's model outlines. I think that I'm all too aware of the amount of work that lies ahead.

Exploration- this has really only started

Feelings- are definitely Uncertain (read, petrified at how much needs to be done).
Thoughts- vague is a good description of my thoughts, I think that I will need to read each resource fairly deeply at the moment before I know whether or not it 'fits' my middle school and history area well enough to be useful.
Actions- searching, searching, searching, reading, reading, reading!