Buffy Hamilton's Blog, page 9

Sean O’Connor Rocks the Write-Around for Collaborative Student Thinking as Part of Presearch and Topic Development with Literary Research

Last year Language Arts teacher Sean O’Connor was one of our first teachers to help us pilot written conversation strategies that we had learned about from Harvey Daniels. ��After attending a Reading the City institute with Daniels, Nancy����Steineke (among other notable literacy leaders) this past January, Sean returned even more energized about the possibilities of written conversation strategies for inquiry and learning. ��He decided to incorporate and modify the write around learning stru...

Toward More Strategic Searching with Presearch Strategy Mapping

Earlier this week, I shared how we used Think, Puzzle, Explore as a fun and meaningful learning structure to ignite student interest in a topic and to build prior knowledge as we started a unit of study on sustainability with 11th grade AP students. ��Those of you who work at the high school level and with AP courses know that carving out sufficient time for research projects can be a challenge when so much of the course hinges on the AP courses as well as other state or district assessments...

Igniting Inquiry with Think, Puzzle, and Explore

Earlier this month, my colleague Jennifer Lund and I met with Linda Katz and Elizabeth Hollis, two of our 11th grade Language Arts teachers, to plan their upcoming research unit on sustainability. ��We wanted to do something fun and interesting to introduce the range of topics to students that would engage them and not begin with them just browsing the resources on the project LibGuide. ��We initially considered using the write-around strategy, but with so many sections of classes and possibi...

Designing and Scaffolding Multigenre Projects and Compositions

I’ve been remiss is not following up on our end of the semester learning activities and experiences from our extended inquiry project with Language Arts teacher Sarah Rust. �� If you haven’t had a chance to read my series of posts about our collaborative efforts or would like a refresher, you can catch up with all of the posts here.�� In my last series post, I discussed different types of formative assessment we were using to evaluate student progress, processes, and products, including their...

Musical Chairs + Book Tasting Rocks!

Upon returning from our holiday break, Jennifer Lund and I had a request from one of our Language Arts teachers to schedule her classes for the popular book tasting activity.�� We faced two challenges: ��the teacher wanted to do the activity in two days (a time challenge), and we had a significant number of books checked out that would make it hard to do the activity with the category oriented version we’ve done for the last year. ���� We decided to mix it up and put a new twist on it by inco...

Mucking Around in the Questions: Libraries and Critical Literacy

CC image http://bit.ly/1BLslM3

“Teacher librarians have tremendous opportunity to enhance studentunderstanding and engagement with the cacophony of languages,discourses and cultures that are clashing and merging in new communicationsspaces. Critical information literacies would give different takeson language, text and knowledge than do the acritical, print-basedpedagogies of current library curricula. Researchers and theorists havedocumented the powerful influence of transnational capital and...

Processing Texts, Ideas, and New Understandings with Twitter Chats + Socratic Seminar

Jennifer Lund and I had the opportunity to partner this month with IB Theory of Knowledge teachers Dan Byrne and Dr. James Glenn. Our instructional design challenge was to think about how we might help student process the first chapters of an advanced text,The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently…and Why, by Dr. Richard Nisbett. Inspired by our previous efforts with Socratic circles and Twitter chat with Emily Russell’s Language Arts classes, we all agreed this me...

New DMLcentral Post—Writing in Libraries: Processes and Pathways to Inquiry and Learning

Writing in Libraries: Processes and Pathways to Inquiry and Learning | DMLcentral via kwout

I invite you to check out my latest post for DMLcentral as I explore the possibilities for writing literacies in libraries. In this post, I share how we are using writing as a springboard for inquiry and engaging with texts here at Norcross High; the post also features a video interview with colleague and friend Sara Kelley-Mudie and her use of written conversation strategies. Many thanks to our faculty...

Holistic and Individualized Formative Assessment of Research and Inquiry Processes

For the last two weeks,our students have been immersed in investigating information and constructing new understandings as they have been composing their research design proposals, revising sections of their proposals, and doing additional research after focusing and narrowing their topics and research questions. As they have gone back and forth in refining their topics and questions and doing the subsequent additional research, we’ve seen our students move back and forth between confusion/do...

Moving from Our Mindmaps to More Focused Topics with Question Lenses and Musical Peer Review

In my last post that is part of this series, I shared how we used mindmapping after our second round of pre-searching to begin honing in our a more specific topic for our research.

After students shared out their mindmaps and big ideas, we asked them to look at their topic through different question “lenses” using an activity shared with me by my colleague Heather Hersey, a school librarian in Seattle. Heather, who adapted her version of the handout fromAn Educator’s Guide to Information Liter...