Thing 5 (cont): Reflective practice

I have completed my sessions with post 16 students - over 4 lessons and 3 weeks. I set outwith the objectives of  showing them
How to structure an effective resrearch strategy;
Introduce new resources that they may not be familiar with;
Plagiarism and referencing;
Structuring a report

I had introduced it with a PowerPoint and gave them a work book and tasks to do and used Herring's PLUS model to try and give them a structure to work round.

Planning before they sat down at a computer was not something they had really done before - breaking down their question into smaller subquestions and finding keywords. I used the 8Q model (http://www.teachingexpertise.com/e-bulletins/enquiry-tools-promoting-emotional-engagement-and-ownership-3593) to formulate questions and identify areas that they wanted to concentrate on and set parameters for their work. I find it fascinating how the majority of the students don't seem to do this before they sit down at a computer - that they jump on Google type in a search term and pick the first couple of entries they come across.

I introduced them to the e-resources we held and to subject gateways and then encouraged them to refer back to their questions as they searched for information.

Plagiarism and referencing is the most difficult area to cover in my opinion - how do you make it interesting? I recently discovered the University of Manchester's resources to support the EPQ which have proved to be a bonus and have tried some of their resources to some effect http://www.manchester.ac.uk/undergraduate/schoolsandcolleges/post-16/epq/support/.

Students were surprised that they were having to spend so long on the planning and locate stage when as  one student said - when can I start writing? For some it was a completely different way of working.

When I did the final session on structuring a report  and told them to start by writing their conclusion - I think that really turned everything on the head for them! I used DMU's HEAT toolkit which has some wonderful resources which can be used for all ages with some tweaking http://www.library.dmu.ac.uk/Support/Heat/ .They had never been shown how to work in this way before and I think that the process I took them though over the 3 weeks was totally alien for many of them.

Thinking over the sessions I feel that the jump from GCSE to Alevels is,  as many of us know, a much bigger jump than the students realise (till much later) and I also think that there is confusion between working independently and indepedent working - students can only carry our independent work when thay have been gven the skills to work indepedently and this in my view means taking them back to the basics. My current school is post 14 -19 so is somewhat of an exam factory -the  focus is on the end goal of passing the exams but we need to equip them with more skills than the ability to pass an exam, maybe equipping them with those skills will raise the attainment in the long term -but that means eating in to the time to focus on the syllabus - a catch-22 situation.