Student-Selected Research Projects

Course

Introduction [4:14]

About
Transcript

Honoring students' identities and learning journeys means trusting their instincts on what they want to learn, but fostering individualized learning can be difficult when instructors are required to preplan the outcomes of their lessons and units. What if you could give students the freedom to research topics of their choice, support their research effectively, and meet district goals? In this session, Elizabeth Rush shares insights on how to structure individualized programs for the library or classroom that combine the teaching of research skills with the opportunity to cultivate student agency in their research questions and learning.

In this course, you will:

Examine the benefits of establishing student-selected research projects
Learn effective strategies for structuring and managing these projects, even with a limited staff or budget
Gain tips on how to enlist the participation of faculty

This course was created from a professional learning event Teaching Research as a Force for Change hosted by School Library Connection and ABC-CLIO. This event explored the challenges and opportunities in teaching research skills and the research process to today's middle and high school students. Please check out the other courses from this event: Controlling Chaos!: Build Student Agency with Self-Selected Research Projects by Elizabeth Barrera Rush, Marketing Your Digital Materials to Students and Teachers by Melissa Thom, and Making Research Actionable: Student-Centered Learning by Design by Jacquelyn Whiting.

This is the Controlling Chaos! session, Building Student Agency with Self-Selected Projects. So our agenda for the hour is and I themed it all on like building student agency, right? So we're talking like construction here. We're going to lay the foundation first by enlisting administration and faculty support, which is absolutely essential if you hope for a successful program. And then we're going to build a culture of respect--not just between or among students, but between you and the students, which is essential to get them to feel able to share and to investigate freely. We're going to convince your students that their interests count, Barb touched on that, where we kind of beat the free will out of the kids by the time they're in middle school. Now, we're going to want to change that for them. So they can really feel invested in their education.

The blueprint, blueprint for success. We're going to put the hands, the power in the hands of the children. Helping them explore their interests is the one gift that you will give them that they will not be upset to have. And it might be a little difficult for you to do, but we'll show you how to do that. Then you're going to plan not to plan. This freaks people out. What do you mean, we're going to do this whole one project without planning? That is just terrifying to most educators when their whole lives are about planning. But we'll talk about that and I'll get you settled with it. Then we're going to discuss, though, the importance of having quality resources as you go through this endeavor with your students.

So first, let's before we go any further, let's talk about what PBL is or self-centered, self-selecting projects and what's genius hour and what's the difference among those three things? Well, PBL is project based learning and students basically learn by actively engaging in real world and personally meaningful projects. However, my experiences when people talk about PBL is that the teacher has already selected the project for the students. So that's not exactly self selected, but it is a project that students can get involved in and see how the curriculum relates to the world. And it does become meaningful because they're active in their pursuit of knowledge and that's great. However, self-selected projects, one level higher, gives students the ability to choose a topic themselves. So our goal would be to teach skills in reinforced curriculum, based on a topic that the student has selected. Now it sounds like, wow, do I have to plan for every single project that a student does? No, you really don't, because you would be surprised how easily we can integrate the curriculum into a project. As the students learn, you are able to interject what it is that you need them to learn. Now, genius hour has just one extra or few little extra dimensions to it where we're going to ask students to boil their research down into an essential question. So and the essential question can change over time as they pursue their topic. And we want them to be able to use reliable sources as and determine whether the source is reliable or not. So there's a lot of what evaluation of resources put in the hands of the students that, of course, you will guide. And then we're not going to do research for no purpose. Ultimately, we want them to present to the world. So that's our goal is to get the kids to pick their own project, to get involved in it actively and in the world, and then let the world know what they've discovered.

Additional Resources

Bibliography.

About the Author

Elizabeth Barrera Rush is a library specialist for a school district in Texas. She received her BBA from St. Mary's University in San Antonio and her MSIS from the University of Texas, Austin. Elizabeth has spent over 20 years serving elementary and middle school students in private, charter, and public school libraries as well as the San Antonio Public Library. She is author of Bringing Genius Hour to Your Library: Implementing a Schoolwide Passion Project Program (Libraries Unlimited, 2018) and The Efficient Library: Ten Simple Changes that Save You Time and Improve Library Service (Libraries Unlimited, 2020). She has written articles for Teacher Librarian and School Library Connection. She has been an advocate for libraries speaking in a congressional panel in Washington, D.C., and a consultant for the National Assessment for Educational Progress in writing, and presented webinars and workshops for AASL, INFOhio, and ABC-CLIO. She is a member of TLA, and an active member of ALA's Core: Leadership, Infrastructure, Futures Division as well as co-vice chair of the Cataloging Norms Interest Group and Member of the ALA/AIA Building Award Committee, and a proud ALA Spectrum Champion for the Office of Diversity, Literacy & Outreach.

MLA Citation

Rush, Elizabeth Barrera. "Student-Selected Research Projects. Introduction [4:14]." School Library Connection, ABC-CLIO, August 2021, schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/Course?LearningModuleId=2267489&topicCenterId=2247903.

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https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/Course?LearningModuleId=2267489&topicCenterId=2247903

Entry ID: 2267000