ASSIGNMENT 1 - PART B: SPARKING CURIOSITY & ENGAGEMENT

Learning is messy... Last week, I identified some areas of interest for my independent study for LIBE477.  I had way too many ideas and needed more time to focus my topic.  After much reflection on what would be the most relevant, practical and engaging topic/issue, I have decided to focus my research on the following question:

"How can I engage students in powerful learning 

that is also fun and interesting?"

This overarching question then led to the following secondary questions:

1. How can I effectively engage students with inquiry based learning (IBL) through the Genius Hour project in Social Studies?
2. What technologies would facilitate this kind of learning? What is useful?
3. How can IBL/Genius Hour help connect learners with other learners & experts?
4. How can I deepen student learning through questioning? 
5. How manageable is IBL in today's context?

With these questions guiding me, I am better able to organize my thoughts and research, so here we go!

I begin my learning journey with research that supports IBL.  As previously mentioned, I did a Genius Hour Project with my Sciences humaines 11 (SS11) students this past year.  Given Socials 11 was in flux due to the new graduation curriculum still being in draft mode, and also given the fact I had not taught this class in over 10 years, I wasn't going to plan and create a course that would be dead in a year.  Enter Genius Hour...  

The following are two curricular competencies from BC's new curriculum drafts for Explorations 11.  These two competencies appear in every grade of Social Studies from elementary to secondary and show how important this skill is to develop.

• Use Social Studies inquiry processes and skills to ask questions; gather, interpret, and analyze ideas; communicate findings and decisions
• Assess the credibility and justifiability of evidence, data, and interpretations

Genius Hour is a great IBL project to undertake that fully meets these two outcomes.  Genius Hour requires students to come up with a question/inquiry of personal interest.  Once they have a question, they need to do some research where they will have to decide what sources are useful and reliable and which ones are not and also look at a variety of sources whether digital or book. Finally, they will communicate their learning and findings and share with other learners the answer to their initial question(s).

Genius Hour was not easy to set up nor fun at the start.  In fact, it was über messy.  My first incredible find was this Live Binder by Joy Kirr.  She has curated an excellent selection of Genius Hour resources from a variety of contributors.  This website helped me get organized, find ideas on how to implement and monitor the project and also included assessment rubrics.  Of course, nothing on this site was available in French, so much of what I created was from scratch en français.

Mine was going to be a year long inquiry project with milestones to meet in each term.  One of the first hurdles was the technology.  In an effort to use technology to track student learning, I decided to implement a student blog.  Our district has strict rules about student work and where it is stored.  Therefore, I was limited to the use of Scholantis (our district platform) to create blogs.  This system is relatively new and I was one of the first teachers in the district to use the blogging function.  Uploading images, video and/or data was very glitchy at first.  By December, tech services had it running more smoothly.  Blogging their research was a habit that was hard to develop for most of my students.  Some are still not using it adequately after a year.  Also, blogs in the beginning were less than meaningful and contained superficial content.  This informed me that I had to scaffold the learning more with prompts and ideas for blog posts.  On a separate note, blogging was a great tool to connect students in a PLN, en français which is hard to come by. 

I limited the inquiry projects to anything related to Social Studies in the 20th/21st century.  The next challenge was getting students to come up with thoughtful questions.  Many of the questions were "google-able", or were too big or too limited in focus.   In doing research for this assignment, I came across the "QFT" model (Question Formulation Technique) designed by the Right Question Institute.  Originally, this tool was designed in the 1990's to help low income parents engage more with their child's school by providing parents with questions to ask teachers.  Its creators realized that helping parents develop their own questions led to empowering parents and long term engagement. (Schwartz, 2018)  QFT provides a framework which helps teachers scaffold the creation of an inquiry question through a series of seven steps.  It's not rocket science and yet I could not come up with a tool as logical as this one.  I look forward to applying this strategy in my next Genius Hour project.

Much of what QFT tries to achieve is reiterated in Ramsey Musallam's TED Talk (2013) on "How to Spark Curiosity?"  In this talk, Musallam, a high school chemistry teacher explains that in the 21st century, teachers need to be cultivators of curiosity and inquiry.  We need to confuse and perplex students in order to evoke real questions.  We need to embrace the messiness and let student curiosity drive our teaching as well as their learning.  Questions are the real seeds of learning.

Educators today face many challenges as we attempt to prepare our students for the rapidly changing 21st century world.  This info graphic by the University of Phoenix shows that students need different skills today to enter the workforce than they did 30 years ago.  The connections to Genius Hour/IBL are clear and numerous.

I feel the need to wrap it up and so I will.  Sparking curiosity and engagement is central to deep and even fun learning.  It's often messy, uncomfortable and for many it is uncharted territory.  As I move forward exploring my own inquiry, I will need to look further into the challenges & manageability of IBL as well as explore additional supportive technologies for IBL. 

SOURCES:

BC Ministry of Education. (August 2017).  "Area of Learning:  Social Studies". Draft Curriculum. https://curriculum.gov.bc.ca/sites/curriculum.gov.bc.ca/files/pdf/10-12/social-studies/en_ss_11_exportations-in-social-studies.pdf

Kesler, Chris. (2013). "What is Genius Hour?". YouTube, 3:09. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMFQUtHsWhc

Kirr, Joy. (updated in 2017). "Genius Hour/20% Time". http://www.livebinders.com/play/play/829279?tabid=3c6e3320-c860-6750-7b80-2d6c2e62c69b#anchor

Masallam, Ramsay. (2013). "How to Spark Curiosity?".  TED Talk. https://www.ted.com/talks/ramsey_musallam_3_rules_to_spark_learning?referrer=playlist-tv_special_ted_talks_educatio#t-145799

Santana, Luz & Rothstein, Dan. (2018). "Experiencing the Question Formulation Technique (QFT)". The Right Question Institute - A Catalyst for Microdemocracy. http://rightquestion.org/downloads/Experiencing-the-QFT.pdf

Schwartz, Katrina. (2018). "How Helping Students to Ask Better Questions Can Transform Classrooms". MindShift. https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/51186/how-helping-students-to-ask-better-questions-can-transform-classrooms

IMAGE SOURCES:

Messy Paint courtesy of Pixabay.

Genius Lightbulb courtesy of Google Images.

"Top 10 Skills for the Successful 20th Century Worker" infographic courtesy of the University of Phoenix.