Rebuilding Research Writing

Strategies for Sparking Informational Inquiry

Nanci Werner-Burke, Karin Knaus, Amy Helt DeCamp

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317821113
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Our students must become skilled at finding answers and using information to succeed in college, careers, and daily life. Using inquiry, writing, and technology to infuse passion into the classroom research paper motivates students and results in deeper learning. In this practical, research-based book, authors Werner-Burke, Knaus, and DeCamp encourage you to toss the old index cards and jump-start the classroom research paper so that it is more meaningful, manageable, and effective. Explore innovative ways to help students find engaging topics, collect and evaluate information, and write, rethink, and revise to truly impact their audience. The book is filled with tools and student samples to help you implement the ideas in your own classroom.

Special Features:

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• Clear connections to the Common Core State Standards

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• Ready-to-use classroom handouts for different stages of the research process

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• A handy appendix featuring a sample research project timeline and rubric

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• Helpful examples of real student work and assessments

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• Research-based foundations that guide and inform how the process unfolds and why it works

CHAPTER
1	All That Rises
	Convergence Drives Change

Wax poetic. Bring on the drama. When life gives you lemons, respond with Great Literature! Cosa Nostra Grammatica. Don’t Let the Errorists Win! There are a lot of different aspects to being an English Language Arts teacher. Some of them are available on t-shirts. You know, the clever, witty … nerdy … kind. You became an ELA teacher because of a love of poetry, drama, literature, grammar, red pens, or a combination of these. For many of us, the research paper represents a challenge that seems separate from these “art” parts of our field. A lot of our students feel this way, too, seeing a great chasm between the task of producing a research paper and anything remotely related to their lives, plans, and passions. We can do so well with helping our students explore their identities and the human condition through literature, but as it has traditionally been taught, the research paper is sometimes more an exercise in tediousness than it is in student learning and growth.

Life, Love, and the Literature

You know that there are two parts (at least!) to being a teacher: knowing and loving your content, and then also being able to cultivate this love of language arts and build related skills with your students. People who don’t embrace both of those areas will wash out of the profession (or should—life is too short to work every day at something you don’t get any satisfaction from, and kids deserve better than mediocrity). It used to be that we “taught the research paper” so that the college-bound in our classes would be prepared for post-secondary academic work. That’s changed. Knowing how to find information and be able to work with it is more than just an exercise for academia. It’s a skill for survival.

In the modern world, we are constantly surrounded by a flood of information (Bean, Moore, Birdyshaw, & Rycik, 1999). The need and expectation to be information savvy are increasing in the work place and in everyday life. Being able to find information and make sense of it is no longer a skill for the few. Information literacy is a crucial skill for this century (American Association of School Librarians, 2007) and, like writing, is a fundamental need for the many (College Board, 2004). The two skills must be recognized and taught in conjunction if we are to prepare our students for active, modern citizenship and living.

At the core, the research paper is about equipping kids with the tools they need to purposefully explore the world as a means of expanding their own. It’s about helping them look for, find, and connect to something strongly, so strongly that they are compelled to put in the effort to read and think deeply about it. They need something that compels them to put in the time to finesse their findings into a work that other people will also want to read, view, listen to, and forge connections with.

It’s a tall order. With this book, our goal is to give YOU more of the tools you need to spark your students, build on their skills and interests, and support them at every step with motivating and innovative ideas. Sometimes, the tools we suggest are questioning strategies that are intended to kick-start and extend. Sometimes, they are larger mini-lessons and activities that focus on content and specific skills. Sometimes, they are digital tools that support the processes of searching, dialoguing, organizing, and presenting. Always, they are supported with explanations from the research that is the memory and collective voice of our profession.

This is not a book of blackline masters. There are models and links to many of our resources online, and you can access them at our publisher’s website: www.routledge.com/eyeoneducation

We hope that you find them to be useful templates for what you want to try in your own classroom. But there’s more to teaching than handing out worksheets, and we all know that, even when some of the “4Ps” (press, parents, publishers, politicians) say otherwise. This book is also not just a list of gadgets and services. Our tools are not meant to be used as cookie cutters.

Technology is a fact of life, and it can enhance teaching and learning significantly, but only when there is a real reason for choosing and using it. Our goal is to offer substance that you can really run with. This text will outline a modern paradigm, one that is needed, one whose time has come, because, as Karl Frisch and Scott McLeod have noted,”shift happens” (Frisch & McLeod, 2007, 2008, 2009, and 2011 … as well as by countless other authors and remixers!).

Making changes can be hard. (How long has the U.S. been adopting the metric system?) Maybe there are so many things already working well in your classroom that you don’t want to tinker with them too much. Or maybe you are looking for new ways to keep things fresh. Either way, the times they are a-changin’, and we’d like to see you be the most prepared you can be to change ahead of the game. The rules and means are changing around your classroom, changing around you, changing around your students. What they will need to know and what they will need to be able to do is on a collision course with their date of graduation, at a rate that is unprecedented in human history. Everything you will need to know to get them ready is beyond the scope of this book, but we’d like to contribute to getting you further along.

At least three elements are converging that are driving the need for change:

1. How the education system is structured

2. How we use information to manage our lives, stay informed, and contribute at work and in society

3. How we use technology to boost our interaction with information and with each other

We’ll unpack each of these elements and discuss how they are interwoven, then outline how the following chapters fit into this framework. By the time you finish the last chapter you may need to he down for a while.

(Re)Structuring Education: A History Lesson

Do your students ever really get to or past the war in Vietnam in their high school history classes? Often, the answer is no. One result is that most kids don’t see historical events as having shaped the world as it is today, because they “never get to” the past fifty years or so. As this book was being written, the bombing incidents at the Boston Marathon occurred, yet in many adolescent classrooms, even those in the social studies area, this event was not acknowledged or discussed. Do we really need to see something in a textbook or official curriculum before we recognize that it has merit? That seems blatantly foolish, and yet, admittedly, there can be quite a disconnect between the usual curriculum and the world in which our students live and breathe.

To head off a similar oversight here at the start of our discussion about education, let’s take a super-quick historical trip through the past 250 years of government involvement in education, and then look more closely at the changes that means for the state of education right now.

Cue up the theme from Jeopardy, and your best inner Alex Trebek voice, and tackle the following:

In what year did the following first occur?

____ A U.S. federal agency issued a call for federal funds to: “(1) raise the educational level of the most disadvantaged members of society, (2) promote economic (or “manpower”) development through the expansion of access to learning, and (3) assimilate new citizens into American society for purposes of productive labor”

____ federally subsidized food and milk purchases were made for school lunch programs

____ a group of governors, working as part of a think tank, issued a call for academic standards that was felt across the states

If you are not sure of the years, try just putting them in chronological order. If you are in ELA, you are likely able read upside down with little effort, so we put the answers on the next page, in (see Figure 1.1, Jeopardy Answers. Try your best, check your answers, and then, unlike that kid who has had your hall pass for fifteen minutes, remember to come back here.

How’d you do?

In the Beginning

Large-scale change always has roots in multiple, smaller changes. When No Child Left Behind (NCLB) was unfolding and schools were in the initial rush to respond to the demands of Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), I often would hear teachers complaining about the program. Some of these complaints were quite justifiable. Others had no roots except for a grumbling resistance to any change. To these teachers, I would often pose the question, “Why are you surprised about this mandate?” After all, it didn’t come out of the blue …

A quick review of history (as accomplished in by your Jeopardy junket) reveals that the federal government has always played a role in U.S. public education, although that role has been the subject of controversy and has definitely increased exponentially in the past fifty years. Federal resources have been a part of American schools since their beginning. With greater allocation of resources come stronger guidelines on how they are to be used.

In recent times, there have been loud, large-scale calls for national educational reform, some from reputable professional organizations and research groups (The National Commission on Writing and the National Writing Project, for example). There have been quieter surges in new and experimental education frameworks and approaches, at the state, district, or class-room level (as in this book!). Add to these the scratched heads of parents and students puzzling over the disconnect (which often results in acting out and sometimes results in dropping out) between the dynamic real world and that of the sometimes-fossilized school system, and you have a snapshot of what has happened in your own lifetime, mixed with those elements that have been churning along for 250 years.

Figure 1.1 Jeopardy answers

In the next section, we explore a short overview of the more recent changes in education. We lay a foundation for the current state of the profession, fueled as it is by a convergence of demands from those who have joined their voices and are moving our nation into new configurations of teaching and learning, with a specific focus on the skills that promote literacy and the making of knowledge.

Where Do Standards Come From?

We can trace the current state of education policies at least back to the Cold War and Sputnik. In 1958, responding to threats of Russia developing space-age technology, and thereby challenging the U.S. to be planetary top-dog, the federal government passed the National Defense Education Act. It focused on providing federal funding for post-secondary educational programs, focusing on science and foreign languages. The premise was twofold: that science and research were the best path to world power, and that communicating with people from other countries would aid us in getting there and then managing them. It can be seen, arguably, as the first major federal foray into curriculum.

Fifty-five years later, we see similar aims and claims in the enormous federal grants coming through the National Science Foundation, STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) initiatives, and in the call to teach and assess “21st Century Skills” that include being able to understand and communicate effectively within different cultural systems. The link between quality education and the defense of a perceived national way of life is inferred, although now we are looking at maintaining some of our global clout and reaching out and up rather than striking back.

The second major federal change came with Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) in the mid-1960s. How was the ESEA established? After President John F. Kennedy’s death in office, President Lyndon B. Johnson continued Kennedy’s legislation proposals for large-scale federal aid to initiate equality. Johnson declared a “War on Poverty” and proposed legislation aimed at ending poverty and racial injustice. One of the objectives was to improve education, in particular the education of poor and disadvantaged youths, and so the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 was formed and Tide I was one of its largest programs. Title I and the ESEA would undergo fine tuning and some name changes as they were evaluated, retooled, and reauthorized periodically over the next thirty years. At the core was a commitment of federal funding to aid disadvantaged children, with the need being based philosophically on social justice and equality and driven by emerging cognitive research. However, although it had enjoyed more lives through re-authorization than your average housecat, ESEA really returned to the national spotlight when it was reconfigured and renamed No Child Left Behind (NCLB).

For many, NCLB was perceived as a major change, but it was only another step in the progression putting government into the educational makeup. In 1989, President G. H. Bush called a meeting of all fifty governors, with the focus on education reform. This National Education Summit was a landmark event, where the nation’s schools were elevated on the priority list for whole-scale attention, and national goals were set. President William J. Clinton, who had been a governor at that meeting, followed it with Goals 2000, and three days into his presidency, President G W Bush issued a concept paper that would become NCLB. Progressively, these events established the need for academic standards, mandated that performance on these standards be assessed on a regular basis, and then that assessment results needed to demonstrate improvement, so that the nation’s students were moving toward a level of proficiency that would be achieved by 2014.

So. 2014. We made many changes along the way, but 100 percent proficiency was and is magically prescribed. Our new focus is on revamping and repackaging our teaching and assessments as we respond, as a profession, to the latest point on our contin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Meet the Authors
• Introduction—Kindred Spirits
• 1 All That Rises—Convergence Drives Change
• 2 Lighting the Fire—Topic Selection with Passion and Curiosity
• 3 Search and Seize—Getting to the Good Sources
• 4 The Death of the Note Card?—The Thoroughly Modern Research Paper
• 5 Speak to the Living—Real Sources, Real Audiences
• 6 Are You Being Served?—What Tech Tools to Use and Why You Should Bother
• 7 (D)RAFT into Unconventional Waters—Deepening Topic Perspectives
• 8 Metaphors Be with You!—Organizing Connections and Building Frameworks for Comparison
• 9 The Nitty-Gritty—Cite, Write, Review
• 10 Beyond the Paper—Impacting Wider Audiences
• Appendix A—Sample Research Project Requirements and Timeline
• Appendix B—Sample Research Paper Rubric
• Appendix C—RAFT Rubric
• Appendix D—RAFT Handout
• References