Elements of projects that motivate - Part 2 of 3

Here is another piece from my revision of The Indispensable Librarian. (Last week was very productive, thank you.) Your comments are welcome.

Elements of projects that motivate

Part One

Activities that involve the researcher:

1. Motivational research projects involve a variety of information finding activities. As librarians we are comfortable with our familiar primary sources of reference books, periodicals, and trade books. Yet the answers to many personal, local, and timely questions cannot be found in them. They can provide excellent background information of important facts, but often we need to talk to experts, conduct surveys, design experiments, or look at other kinds of primary sources to get precise information. The learners in this examples spent time with secondary sources, but the generation of new knowledge by talking to their families and to a local health care provider was involving.
2. Motivational learning tends to be hands-on. Students in the example above conducted interviews, did online database searches, and created a digital slideshow. Many of them use cameras to take photographs and videos to be used within the slideshows. They learned how to upload and share digital files. Students were learning by doing, not just listening. Notice too, how many corollary skills are practiced in this “research” project: writing skills, interviewing skills, photography skills, layout and design skills, and speaking skills.
3. The use of technology can be exciting for many students. Whether for planning, for research, or for communication, many students find the use of technology motivating. Ms Lu’s students used computer programs that were not purposely designed to be “motivational.” It is the challenge of designing containers for a message that give good productivity tools like graphic programs, slideshow creators, and web page construction kits - the virtual equivalent of a set of LEGOs – their motivating qualities.
4. Good projects use formats that take advantage of multiple senses. Ms Lu’s students were asked to communicate their finds not only with words, but sound and sight as well. Our ability to digitize and present information is no longer restricted to the written word but now can include drawings, photos, sounds, music, animations, and movies. All are formats that carry important and often unique information.
5. Interesting projects are often complex, but are broken into manageable steps. One of the first things Mr. Ojampa helped students in Ms Lu’s class do was outline the tasks to be done and established a timeline for their completion. Checking off completed tasks is satisfying and motivational, and students learned some corollary planning and time management skills in the process. Large projects can be overwhelming even for adults, but planning smaller steps, building timelines, creating frequent deadlines, and scheduling multiple conferences turn complexity into manageability. It’s also clear that some tasks in effective projects often require sustained periods of time to complete, so the regular fifty-minute block of “library time” doesn't always work very well making flexibly scheduled library time is important.
6. Collaborative learning is often stimulating and results in better products than individual work. Ms Lu asked her students to work in teams. Joint problem solving, assigning and accepting responsibility, and discovering and honoring individual talents helps create a synergy that resulted in better, more satisfying presentations than students working alone would have produced. Not every project needs to be a joint effort, but real-world work environments increasingly stress teamwork. Teamwork in school is not only more enjoyable, but leads to the application of practical interpersonal skills as well.

Assessments that Help the Learner:

1. Motivational research projects have results that are shared with people who care and respond. Ms Lu’s kids got the same credit as those who may have simply taken a multiple choice test or written a short paper on “preventable diseases.” So why would kids go to all the extra work a project like the one described entails? Kids get hooked because adults take the time to really look at the work they have done and comment on it. The community, both physically and virtually, visited the student’s shared slideshow presentations and left comments – both compliments and criticisms. Assessments and reviews by peers, experts, and neighbors (any audience beyond the teacher) are common in scouting, athletics, dramatics, 4-H, and music organizations. Students who know they have a public audience tend to have a higher degree of concern about the quality of their work.
2. Learning that is assessed by an authentic tool is more meaningful that a paper and pencil test. Student had the checklists at the beginning of the project and used them several times to determine their progress during the project. It was easy to recognize both what was completed as well as what needed improvement. Quality indicators like rubrics and checklists that are given to students when the assignment is made can help guide learning and keep guesswork to a minimum. As students become more sophisticated in the research process, they should be expected to choose or design their own “quality indicators” one of the attributes of a genuinely intrinsically motivated person.
3. Examples give the learner a clear idea of what quality work looks like. Ms Lu’s class next year can use some of the diseases slideshows as exemplars. Topics may need to change enough from year to year so that copying is not possible.
4. Well-designed projects allow the learner to reflect, revisit, revise, and improve their final projects. While Ms Lu’s class had a completion date, students continued to edit and revise their work as they received feedback from web site visitors and their peers. There is satisfaction to be gained from observed growth. Good projects, like gardens, musical repertoires, and relationships, are probably always works in progress.

Why don’t all teachers design projects with some or all of these elements. Well, a 4^th “A” sneaks in. (See Part 3 tomorrow.)

Elements of projects that motivate - Part 1 of 3

Here is another piece from my revision of The Indispensable Librarian. (Last week was very productive, thank you.) Your comments are welcome.

Elements of projects that motivate

Consider this scenario:

Ms Lu’s seventh grade health class must meet a state standard dealing with “preventable diseases.” Traditionally, she had asked her students to read a chapter in their textbook, held some classroom discussions, and required the students to write a short paper on a disease she assigned to each individual. There was a multiple-choice test at the end of the unit. Ms Lu always felt the students didn’t pay much attention to this important topic and quickly forgot anything they’d learned. 

This year, at the urging of Mr. Ojampa, the librarian, Ms Lu decided to try a different strategy. Students:

•  Surveyed their families to determine if there are any hereditary illnesses in their family and listed them.
• In small groups formed by family illness, the students worked with both Ms Lu and Mr. Ojampa to answer this question: “What are the best ways of reducing my chances of developing this disease?” Students had to use at least one print resource, one website, and one interview with a local health professional as part of their research. Mr. Ojampa introduced students to the new health subscription database and showed students how to access it from home using a link from the library website.
• Using checklists they and the librarian created as a guide, the students developed an oral presentation supported with a slideshow that helped communicate the supported answer to their question. The use of multi-media in the slideshow was worth extra-credit.
• Students gave the presentation to the class and posted their slideshow on a website that could be accessed and commented on publically.
• Teams did an assessment of the other teams’ presentations and did a self-assessment of their own slideshow using the checklists.

At the end of the unit, Ms Lu and Mr. Ojampa reviewed each project and their own efforts. They both agreed that students were concerned about both the quality of the information they used and the quality of their slideshow. Ms Lu felt she needed to improve the presentation rubric and figure out how to share the projects online in a less time-consuming way. Mr. Ojampa’s short survey of students after the conclusion of the project told him that the students found the new database useful in completing the assignment and were likely to use it again.

While an information/technology literacy curriculum is essential, its success will depend on the quality of the individual projects that support it. Good projects don’t just happen. They have some common elements that tend to group themselves into three categories:

Assignments that matter to the student:

1. Motivational research projects have clarity of purpose and expectations. Students working on a project about a disease to which their family is prone, they could learn ways to avoid or mitigate its effect on their own lives. Ms Lu made sure the students knew that the purpose of the unit was not just learning about diseases, but also knowing how to evaluate information sources would be a skill useful to them for the rest of their lives. The checklists of expected quality criteria were given at the beginning of the assignments along with a timeline for completion. Students knew exactly what Ms Lu and Mr. Ojampa expected them to do.
2. Motivational research projects give students choices. If the purpose of the assignment is to teach a basic understanding (that certain diseases can be avoided) or a set of skills (how communicate effectively using a slideshow), it doesn’t make any difference what the specific disease might be. Dig down and look at the core concepts that research assignments are trying to teach, and let the students pick a specific subject that interests them.
3. Motivational research projects are relevant to the student’s life.For our students, osteoporosis or diabetes or heart disease are conditions only suffered by people who may be impossibly old (over 30). But by asking her students to interview their families, the teacher added real faces and lives to these diseases. The stories resonate with those doing the interviewing. So many times we ask our students to research important topics – environmental issues, historical issues, social issues - but fail to help them make the vital connection of why the findings are important to the people in town in which they live. Strive for projects that are relevant because they are timely, local, or personal.
4. Motivational research projects stress higher level thinking skills and creativity. Think how different the results of a project that asks for a creative solution to a problem are from a paper that simply asks an “about” question. (List ten facts “about” strokes.) Find ways to move up Bloom’s taxonomy from the recall level to analysis, evaluation, and creativity. (“What are the three most important things a person can do to prevent having a stroke? Justify your rankings.)
5. Motivational research projects answer genuine questions. At the beginning of the project, most students didn’t know their family’s medical history. They didn’t always know that some illness can be prevented. Ms Lu and Mr. Ojampa probably didn’t know these things either. Genuine questions are ones to which the teacher or library does not have a pre-conceived answer. Unfortunately, adults rarely ask questions to which they do not believe they already know the answer. Good projects try to answer only genuine questions. 

Tomorrow: Activities that involve the researcher.

BFTP: Don't defend any book

A weekend Blue Skunk "feature" will be a revision of an old post. I'm calling this BFTP: Blast from the Past. Original post March 1, 2007. This post went on to bigger things as a column that can be found here.

Philosophy of Resource Selection
Public education in a democracy is committed to facilitate the educational growth and equal educational opportunity of all students. The freedom to learn, therefore, and the corresponding freedom to teach are basic to a democratic society. In order to meet these goals, School District 77 is committed to selecting educational resources which will aid student development in knowledge acquisition, critical thinking, objective evaluation and aesthetic appreciation. from Mankato Area Public Schools Board Policy 606: TEXTBOOKS AND INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS

The discussion over the Newbery Award winning book The Power of Lucky continues on LM_Net, the AASL blog and, I am sure, in meetings, phone conversations and e-mails throughout the country. I find it upsetting that so many professional librarians seem to have lost the basic understandings of selection, reconsideration, in loco parentis, and intellectual freedom. But perhaps it's time for a wake-up call that we all need to brush up on some of these concepts.

The main objection I have to the conversations has been that we are trying to defend a single book rather than defending a fair and open process for selecting and retaining any instructional material in our schools. Quite frankly, if a school decides to remove Lucky or any other book from its library or classrooms, so be it. If it decides to block every blog on the web, so be it. If it decides that Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet movie not be not be allowed because it shows a glimpse of Olivia Hussey's breasts, so be it. So long as due process has been followed in making the decision. While I can't imagine the circumstances under which I would do so, I like knowing that as a citizen I can request that  ill-chosen materials be removed from a public school.

As I remember from li-berry school, this is how professionals deal with the selection of and potential censorship of instructional materials:

1. They assure that the district has a board adopted selection/reconsideration policy. Oh, and they've read it.

2. They select all materials based on the stated selection criteria in the  policy. Here are ours:

9. To anticipate and meet needs through awareness of subjects of current interest.3. They select only materials based on authoritative and reliable review sources.

Criteria for the Selection of Resources. Selection of resources shall be constant with the following principles:
1. To consider the characteristics and philosophy of the school and community when selecting resources.
2. To select resources which will meet needs, find use, reflect current research, and meet current standards of excellence.
3. To provide resources that will enrich and support the curriculum, taking into consideration the varied interests, abilities, and maturity levels of the individuals served.
4. To provide resources that will stimulate growth in factual knowledge, literary appreciation, aesthetic values and ethical standards.
5. To provide a background of information which will enable individuals to make intelligent judgments in their daily lives.
6. To provide resources relative to controversial issues so that individuals may develop informed opinions and practice critical reading and thinking.
7. To provide resources representative of the many religious, ethnic, and cultural groups and their contributions to our American heritage.
8. To place principle above personal opinion and reason above prejudice in the selection of resources of the highest quality in order to assure a comprehensive collection appropriate for the users.

4. If they are asked to remove an item selected from the instructional program, they do not defend the material, but insist that the board adopted reconsideration policy and procedures be followed. This policy should require that a standing reconsideration committee be appointed at the beginning of each school year. When requested by the committee, they will provide the rationale and resources used for selection of the item under reconsideration.

5. Once a resource is selected, they do not restrict its use by any student. Professionals cannot act in the place of parents (in loco parentis) to restrict access to materials to individuals.  

That's it. Know your selection policy, select from authoritative reviews, and insist on due process if a book is challenged. It's not hard, but it does take genuine courage at times. And it is not only why we need professionals in all our school libraries, but professionals who act professionally.

At some point in time, schools will need to wake up and realize that the principles of selection and reconsideration need to be applied to online resources, including the web, as well as print and audio-visual materials. Does your district have a written policy that upholds the concepts of intellectual freedom in regard to the Internet? Who decides what is blocked and how are those decisions made? Are there resources from ALA and ISTE that can help schools formulate good policy in this area?

Other basic rules that I've forgotten? Library school was many, many, many years ago! 

Image from <www.artlex.com>