EPQ planning

The students have returned to the course, handed in their mini project, had their feedback and are now in the throes of completing their project propsal forms.

The mini projects were useful in giving an indication into the way they work, the different approaches they took to planning and reflecting on their progress to date.

We have now started the planning stage and last week the students looked their objectives:

What skills do they want learn?
Why do they want to study the subject?
What do they want to gain from the whole process?

They also have to reflect on the reasons for their choice of subject, their future plans and how their EPQ will fit into this. In approximately nine months time they will be looking back on their reasons, the objectives, their timescales, the resources they used and taking stock of their EPQs and reflecting on what they have learnt and gained from the whole process. Evaluation is key to a successful project but is often forgotten in the relief of completing the task.

One of the things I learnt from last year, and I am going to implement this year, is to ask the students to produce a mini literature review of 3 sources to ensure that they can find and evaluate good sources.  An excellent tool for evaluating resources which I will be encouraging the students to use is the Information Source Evaluation Matrix (ISEM) http://www.library.dmu.ac.uk/Images/Selfstudy/ISEMLeaflet.pdf

I also learnt from bitter experience not to sign off off any PPFs until the students have made a cast iron choice and have no intention of changing their direction half way through the project!

The next stage is time management and GANTT charts.

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.

Thing 5: Reflective practice

I'm always aware that I need to reflect more in my job but using a blog to do this seemed too time consuming - having to set it up/update it and too public!

In my post I constantly tell students that they need to self-evaluate - reflect on what they've done and what they could have done to improve it and what they are going to do next time -  but I don't do it myself!

In September I started a Masters. My first assignment was a reflective essay on the work I had done at my previous school on the Extended Project Qualification with recommendations for what could be done at my current school. Writing that piece made me stop and think about the work I had done over the previous 5 years with students from KS3 to KS5. I realised that I had been constantly tweaking sessions expanding and reducing them to fit the available time and abilities of the students but I hadn't recorded it anywhere. I had looked at exam criteria for the EPQ, resources available, produced a toolkit to support students learning and record keeping so that they could reflect on what they had learnt - but I hadn't done any of this myself. The only physical evidence I had was the versions of the toolkit (now on version 5), two reports analysing two questionnaires that students had done and memories of discussions that I had had with the Director of Learning who was responsible for the EPQ. How much easier my life, and essay, would have been if I had taken time to record my thoughts on the toolkit, the successes and failures of the teaching tasks that I had done and to record student observations.

After half-term I start teaching year 12s for the first time in my new school, this is new for my school who have never had a Librarian that has done this before and will be a new experience for me in this school.

I have gone back to my toolkit to tweak it for the students who are going to be doing a 5 week research project. I have looked at the PowerPoint I have created and some of the tasks that I have used in the past to try teach students how to use e-resources and catalogues, how to reference and to try and teach them about plagiarism - always an exciting topic!

I have decided that I am going to use this blog to evaluate those sessions and see what worked well, what didn't and how I am going to improve those sessions. So watch this space.....