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How can I help more teachers to get involved in the research process?
SIRS Leading Issues, found inside SIRS Researcher, offers a unique format for helping students use critical thinking centering on important issues that touch their lives and capture their interest. That's great news for librarians, because it's easy to generate interest in these topical issues for use in student inquiry-based learning activities.
Of course there are also the stumbling blocks that prevent many teachers from really buying in to this way of learning especially if they are grounded in textbook learning:
- How do I provide models for the students to easily organize and report their conclusion?
- How do I integrate new technology methods in using information for presenting student reports?
- How do I evaluate a variety of student projects that are not traditional?
- How will the time these research projects take impact my ability to cover the curriculum?
- Do any of these projects help students to learn better and achieve more?
The good news about the effectiveness of well-organized inquiry-based learning activities is that they indeed help students to learn better and to enjoy their learning more. So says scientific research (details).
SIRS Leading Issues provides excellent models of traditional and some new ways for students to express their reasoned opinions. These models integrate the unique steps in the Pro vs. Con format into the ways that students organize and present information. Teachers can pick from four models: Formal Research Paper; Mini-Research Report; PowerPoint presentation; and Mini-Debate. The Mini-Research and Mini-Debate have teacher as well as student editions to guide these projects.
You can access these models by clicking the Educator Resources link at the top of your Researcher Interface. Scroll down to click and open these resources.
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