A Seventh Grade Team’s ‘Research Day’…

Last year four team teachers, well let me first give you some back information. My school does teaming which means one teacher of each: math, social studies, science, and IRLA (integrated reading language arts) are a team and the students switch between each of those teachers for their core subjects. Each grade level has four teams.

Now, last year (2017-2018) one team approached myself, the media specialist (Mary), and the teacher resource specialist for gifted and talented (Rebecca), with an idea! They noticed that their students (all students) need more skills in terms of research preparedness. They proposed spending one day rotating around to the seven of us learning a variety of skills such as:

  • backwards design planning
  • databases
  • paraphrasing
  • enhanced searching online
  • interpreting data (graphs)
  • using technology for organization
  • note taking skills

We are again (2018-2019) doing the research day this year with two changes. First, we are facilitating this day sooner in the school year. Second, based on feedback from last year’s students, we are making each session more hands-on for the students.

My Piece of the Puzzle… Google Keep📝

I felt the students could benefit by finding out or rediscovering the possibilities of Google Keep as a means to stay organized and utilize a one-stop place for all their research items. I shared the following Google Slides in the Classroom created for this day. To address ‘making it more hands-on’ I’m going to pick and choose a couple items from the Slides to mention then give them time to do the “During Session” Google Classroom “Assignment” pictured below and maybe even plan out the “After Session” “Assignment” (also pictured).

Also based on conversations with the students, I posted a question in Classroom:

How have you assisted students in getting better at research? I would love to read about it in the comments below.

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