“If we listened to our intellect, we’d never have a love affair. We’d never have a friendship. We’d never go into business, because we’d be cynical. Well, that’s nonsense. You’ve got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.” RAY BRADBURY

It’s been a fair while since I last posted on Ungooglable questions, (or indeed, on anything). Theres a really good reason for that. We’ve been battling a rather drawn out campaign against our chosen questions, all the while making our own tools and plans as we went – building our wings on the way down. The process has been pretty hectic, but the lessons learned will make the next set of projects better planned and better scaffolded. In the end the results have at least been encouraging enough to support the idea that we were right to change from our business as usual report writing and try something new.

As a class, we had managed to create some great questions that would result in more than just fact gathering exercises. This was heartening, and it felt for a while like most of the heavy lifting on our projects had been done. We managed to breeze our way though the questioning phase with some ease once we understood that the goal was to create questions that couldn’t be answered by simple, low level thinking. The class came up with a wide variety of questions that required  a lot more thought than simple fact gathering and rehashing ‘in their own words’ could provide. This in itself was an idea that many students baulked at. – ‘Why does it have to be my own words? these words are better and I think I understand them pretty well‘ – is an actual quote from miss 13-going-on-19.

It’s a valid question to ask really, (though perhaps without the head-moving-side-to-side thing students often do at that age when displeased.) What is the learning intention behind simply rewording facts from the internet? It’s pretty low level stuff for a kid on the fast track to high school, and it rewards the neat methodical kids who can draw a good mindmap, and ironically, it disadvantages those same kids to like to argue with you day in, day out. As a result, these arguers dont ever really buy into information reports, because regurgitation is expected, and regurgitation is boring. They phone it in, and they are probably right to, because the new Digital Technologies curriculum calls this consuming technology, and it’s pretty low on the list of desired skills.

This second phase – actually answering the questions we’d made – posed the major problem of the Ungooglable Egypt task. In essence, the question that challenged us for quite some time had been “If Google can’t answer it and you’ve never taught us how to do that explicitly for ourselves, how are we going to get this done?” The answer to that was for us to spend a lot more time on it than I’d originally planned,  because I’d never explicitly taught this way either. We did a lot more research and a lot more planning and  created more mindmaps than we had ever done before, and after all this, we still needed to actually draft our reports. This extra workload didn’t go down well, but there needed to be time for students to shift  mindsets and get better explicit skills for analysing facts, instead of just telling them back to the teacher in different words or ways. It’s the difference between creating content and consuming content, between ‘tweeting’ and ‘retweeting’, if you like, and developing the skills to do that was never going to be a quick process, especially with no real evidence for students that it was worth the effort. The response to these fears from their teacher (essentially ‘trust me on this‘) didn’t allay fears of middle years students with a keen eye for wasted time. My hope is that in the next project, we can look back and see more clearly what it is we are aiming at by working in this way.

For year six and seven students of a very broad skill range, the sudden shift from doing something like reporting back, (an idea that they are finally getting their heads around by middle school,) and actually creating content through opinion and analysis, (something they are too rarely asked to do), has been a steep curve full of frustrations but I think there have also been new discoveries. For example, it’s led to a simple discovery that students retelling facts in a report can, and indeed have been, quite easily hiding some pretty shallow researching skills. Students have been surprised, and no doubt appalled by the increased amount of information they need to uncover to effectively answer their questions, and it’s revealed to me that the critical researching skills of these ‘digital natives’ are, in many cases, quite poor. This has informed my literacy goals, as vocabulary has often been the limiting factor in a student’s ability to phrase searches in multiple forms and find information that lies just past the first few obvious search terms. We will need to work on this, too.

On the plus side –  we’ve come to realise a really valuable truth about facts. When we broaden our questions and follow our own trails, we tend to stray into each others territory as we gather them. One of the greater sucesses of this project in the class has been the use of Edmodo as a message board for students to post useful links to each other. Many a frantic request for assistance has been met not by the teacher, (although I did throw in the odd link,) but by peers working on other questions who either stumbled upon or used  a relevant link. Students were genuinely surprised about this crossover, thinking usually of historical facts as self contained. It helped a lot with context, as kids started to fot their questions together. It’s highlighted a need to share end products as well.

Some of this might sound a bit hard and sloggy, but the point is, a research information report or powerpoint, (of which these middle years students must now have done hundreds,) has been rendered essentially new and strange by being shifting our focus onto opinion and evidence instead of ordered facts. As a result, it has become a great platform for teaching thinking and justifying, as well as teaching questioning.

We focussed recently on  the fact that after the facts were gathered and sorted, there was still another step to make before drafting if we wanted to be sure of answering our higher order questions. This was met with some consternation, particularly by the students who’d mastered simple regurgitation and two-source bibliographies. Proudly they had come to me to show their research facts and stated with confidence that they were ready to write a draft. They were a touch crestfallen to realise that I’d added another step, “before writing your facts in a draft, you need to first relate them to your main question and then make your own conclusions about them.”

But the best bit so far was miss high achiever who had set herself the tough question of explaining how to spot the difference between real and fake artefacts. She’d gone very deep into websites on radio carbon dating and was being utterly defeated by the language. Thinking I was helping, I gave her a pretty clear weblink and suggested she add this to her report, (time was running out). Her response underlined why all the time spent so far is perhaps worth it in the long run. “I can’t use it until I know what it means.” She had to understand it in order to make an argument with it. In a report, evidently, she could have more easily faked that understanding. I think many middle years teachers will agree, a proven understanding of the content is often missing in student information reports on Egypt, with countless children proudly stating information to which they have not yet fully understood, because they rarely need to justify it or back it up. – e.g: “only kings were mummified. – Our website relies on your contributions to continue its work.” (an actual note in Ms unnamed’s Egypt report notes…)

And so I think we are getting somewhere now, even though the time it’s taken and quotient of eye-rolls we have used up is remarkably high. It’s also worth acknowledging that in my particular context, the process will take longer with some of the class, with literacy levels spanning years 3 to 9, a spread that means we usually move forward in 30 separate directions at 30 seperate speeds. I still see in even the most struggling students a willingness at least to analyse their information more carefully and collect a larger pile of facts to include in their reports. For this cohort, it is a good start. In the past, Ms Unnamed’s quote above would have slipped through into the final draft, more often than not.

And I think that next time, (there will definitely be a next time) some simple tweaks like improved access to basic information in the initial steps of the projects and a more thorough foregrounding and scene setting of the material, (which I somewhat  neglected in my rush to get going this time round), will certainly move the bar higher again. But the proof will be in the eating, and the Egypt reports are due this coming week. (Last week actually, but I’m soft like that) and I’m looking forward to comparing this term’s information reports to the last set, side by side. I’ll include that in the next post.

Setting students ungooglable questions, then, has turned out to be the easy part. The battle has been in rewiring a class to look deeper at the answers they give, and to contribute their own opinons and reasoning into the mix. It’s this that has proven to be the real pitched battle, but at the same time, it’s proven, simply by how hard the battle has been, that it’s a pretty worthwhile battle to have.

And worth every dramatic eye-roll along the way…