Doing "Independent" Inquiry

Today we began our first "independent" inquiry project. I put it in quotes because no inquiry is actually independent, but I want to note that students are now doing the work of inquiry on their own as an extension of that which we have been doing as a class.

The last page of the synthesis exam that students just completed asked them two questions that will lead to the next phase of our work: 1) what sort of action can we take as a class to connect what we learned to other human beings across the globe and 2) what questions have come up during our study that you want to learn more about. These two questions helped me to shape the next phase of our class.  To the first question, students agreed that education is the best tool the Maya had for responding for change, and that education can take many forms whether it is formal education or learning how to adapt traditional methods to changing circumstances; therefore, students agreed that the action they want to take is to develop a relationship with a school in Guatemala. For this, we will do an action plan. To the second question, I saw the kinds of topics students were interested in learning more about and developed a multigenre inquiry project for them to 1) research their topic, 2) develop a research question, and 3) synthesize their findings into a multigenre project where they show different points of view and information from several genres.

Last night, I asked students to write a half page about the topic they chose and why. Today, we talked about how to go from researching a topic to doing inquiry to answer a question. Students wrote their initial research question and went to our computer lab to do an initial search for sources. After previewing several sources, students selected one, completed a source information sheet, and then wrote their notes on their research log. The source sheet and research log were labeled #1. Questions that emerged were related to who authored these sources, where can we find copyright dates, how do I change my search terms to get better results? This was a more effective way of teaching about sourcing than lecturing on it, and tomorrow, we will talk more about reliability of sources before doing the research log #2.

Some interesting content-related questions emerged:
Student: Wait, Mrs. Donovan, so was the United Fruit Company bad?
Me: What makes you say that?
Student: Here, it says they took over the Maya land and forced them into labor, and for people who didn't work, they passed "vagrant laws" punishing them. So were they bad?
Me: Well, the people in America were able to get affordable bananas? Is it that good or bad? So what am I saying?
Student: It depends on where you are living, huh?
Me: Point of view has something to do with it, yes. I can't wait to read your paper!