Buffy Hamilton's Blog, page 10

New Publications, Fall 2014

I am delighted to share two recent publications I’ve co-authored that have recently hit the press this fall!

Reimagining Reference in the 21st Century | Purdue University Press via kwout

First, my Cleveland Public Library colleague Anastasia Diamond-Ortiz and I have co-written a chapter for Reimagining Reference in the 21st Century from Purdue University Press that is part of the Charleston Insights in Library, Archival, and Information Sciences. Our chapter,

“Participatory Approaches to Buildi...

Pre-Search and Mindmapping to Narrow a Topic Focus

In my last post, I shared how we were moving deeper with our second round of more targeted pre-search after students had narrowed topic choices to one from their work with the first phase of pre-search. To help our students begin to make sense of the information they had collected during their second round of pre-search, Sarah and I introduced mindmapping to our two classes. There were a couple of factors that influenced this decision:

I had previously used mindmapping with great success at m...

Written Conversation Strategies PD with Our NHS Faculty

My fellow librarian Jennifer Lund and I were delighted yesterday to have the opportunity to do an hour PD session on Harvey Daniels’ written conversation strategies with our NHS Faculty. Roughly 25 teachers, our principal, and one of our assistant principals attended the session; the mix of different departments, including Modern Languages, Science, Math, Language Arts, ESOL, Special Education, Social Studies, and Health and Physical Education, created a wonderful energy as all of our partici...

Simple Yet Powerful Formative Assessment of IR with Sarah Rust

Every Wednesday is Independent Reading (IR) day here in our Language Arts classes here at NHS. Today, Language Arts teacher Sarah Rust, one of our awesome collaborative partners, did this very simple yet interesting formative assessment with her students. The instructions:

Students selected a sticky note of a color of their choosing and then composed their responses. As an extra touch to celebrate the concept of IR, Ms. Rust then took their responses and fashioned them into the letters “IR.”...

Pre-Searching Round Two: Moving Toward a More Specific Topic for Research and Inquiry

After introducing students to some basics of information evaluation, we began our second phase of pre-searching on Monday, October 6. Our learning targets included (based on our district content area standards and the AASL Standards for the 21st Century Learner):

I can use prior background knowledge as context for new learning.
I can find, evaluate, and select appropriate sources to answer questions.
I can read widely and fluently to make connections with self, the world, and previous reading.
I...

Collaborative Information Source Evaluation: Research/Inquiry Circles and the CRAAP Test

Last week, students completed the gentle entry-level phase of pre-search (see the end of this post for more detailed reflections); teacher Sarah Rust and I felt it would be helpful to introduce information and source evaluation skills to our students before moving forward into the next round of pre-searching. We grouped students into collaborative “research” or “inquiry” circles based on their initial topic interests. We plan to use these research circles as a medium for workshopping with sm...

Sticky Notes as Formative Assessment for Information Literacy Instruction: Coding Student Responses

Yesterday I blogged about our pre-searching activities and the use of sticky notes for some gentle formative assessment. Today I want to share how I went about coding the student responses not only to get a sense of students’ thinking during the two days of pre-searching, but to also use the data as a baseline of sorts in hopefully looking a broad collection of their work as we try to track their trajectory of growth and progress through this extended research unit.

Coding Information Sources

I...

Beginning Our Research and Inquiry Experiences with Pre-Searching

We formally began our first steps into our fall research experience with Ms. Rust’s 12 British Literature/Composition Honors students by giving thema few days to pre-search their initial lists of topics of interests. We introduced the research guide and took a few minutes to discuss the purpose of pre-searching and to encourage them to exhaust as many of the databases and search engines in the guide; we also told students they could explore information sources they knew would be meaningful (...

Inquiring with Students: What Do or Can “Good” Research Projects Look Like?

Responses from Ms. Rust’s 2nd and 3rd period students

We have just started a new inquiry unit with Language Arts teacher Sarah Rust and her students in 12 British Literature/Composition; although the course is identified as a senior level course, most of the students are juniors due to the nature of the IB curriculum. We wanted to give students an opportunity to go deep with a research project and have opportunities to develop their own research questions and target processes and skills they...

Connecting and Assessing Individualized Independent Reading with Paired Book Chats, Collaborative Thinking, and Big Group Share

Last year, Jennifer Lund and I worked with a small group of Language Arts teachers to pilot an independent reading component to their courses. This initiative focused on providing students a dedicated day a week (most selected Wednesday) to read any text of their choice for an entire class period. We worked with teachers and students to provide targeted readers’ advisory, individualized and small group recommendations, and ideas and strategies for formative assessments; we also documented be...