A student comes over to my table with a look of exasperation on her face. “What’s up Haley? Do you have a question?” I inquire over the top of another student’s chromebook.
Haley looks flustered as she splutters, “I can’t find any information about Christopher Columbus!”
What I want to say back is this- “Really? You can’t find ANYTHING about one of the most famous (although controversial) explorers in history? With the world at your fingertips? Back in my day we had a long metal drawer in the library and…” But I hold my tongue (and my frustrations) as I remember that Haley is only 8, and here I am asking her to harness one of the most influential and powerful technological tools of our time. It’s kind of a tall order. Research has shown that although navigating the online world isn’t easy, it is a necessary part of students’ learning (Leu et. al 2014). The “New Literacies” intertwined within the internet are also intertwined with students’ future. So even though I may want to abandon this research assignment at the first sign of struggle, I press on, because that’s what good teachers, and good learners do.
Michelle Hagerman and Amber White, writing for Reading Today in 2014, propose for educators an initially intimidating formula for “Enhancing Online Inquiry Skills.” (You can find an exerpt of this from Hagerman here.) Let’s take a look at it…
Wow. I haven’t seen an expression with that many brackets since high school. Is there a significance behind the lowercase i? Anyone? Okay, so while their formula looks a little frightening, Hagerman and White have actually come up with a pretty explicit and comprehensive framework that can be quite useful to teachers who are looking to help students improve their online inquiry skills.
If we break down the formula a bit, we can see each letter stands for what Hagerman and White call a strategy- although I would consider it more of a teaching/learning concept. The cubed letters are represented 3 times in the strategy set, and the squared letters- 2 times. Not so bad, right? (I still don’t know why the i is lowercase, although "lowercase" is apparently a new literacies thing.) This gives us a total of 10 “strategies” in the set, each of which have their own “bubble” below. Because my brain works in colors, that’s what you see in the graphics that follow. Blue concepts are for prereading, pink is for locating information, and orange is for moments of close reading.
Hagerman and White assist teachers even more by proving guiding questions for each “strategy.” All that’s left to do now is to unpack the question and use it to develop a mini-lesson (or a series of lessons).
So does any of this look brand new to teachers? The blue prereading strategies and guided questions are nothing new- although I would argue that the word “have” should be removed from the guided questions. Instead of what do we HAVE to learn about, the question should read, what do we WANT to learn about? Because kids generally hate “having” to do things. Even the yellow close reading strategies aren’t looking new- for close reading online is very similar to close reading offline-except that we add multimedia and hyperlinks to the mix- something that Hagerman and White have leftout.
What is looking “new” for teachers is the concepts, as I like to call them, in the pink bubbles. One that has seem to become automatic for many of us adults is the concept of source selection. Busy working professionals (and mothers of children under the age 3) have no time to be clicking around through search results trying to locate a website with the information we need. No, we crave our toddlers demand efficiency- we want our first click to be the one that works, so we consider our “promising” sources carefully, weeding out ads and commercial websites quickly. But these are foreign waters for our students.
In a world that is plagued “fake news” there is an immense importance for students (nevermind the general public) to understand the concept of trustworthiness- otherwise known as credibility. Can we trust the information we read online to be valid? Is it presented by a credible, knowledgeable author? This is another extremely important concept included by Hagerman and White, and one, that research shows is desperately needed (Standford History Education Group, 2016).
So how to we begin to integrate these concepts into our already crammed teaching schedule? What resources are available for teachers like us to put these concepts into practice?
Will little Haley ever find information about Columbus?
Stay tuned for more to come...
- Christal
- Christal
Citations:
Leu, D.J., Zawilinski, L., Forzani, E., & Timbrell, N. (2014). Best practices in new literacies and the new literacies of online research and comprehension. In Morrow, L.M. & Gambrell, L. B. (Eds.) Best practices in literacy instruction. 5th Edition. New York: Guilford Press.
Schira Hagerman, M., White, S. (2013), ‘What’s the best formula for enhancing online inquiry skills?’, Reading Today. December 2013/ January 2014, 20 - 21
Stanford History Education Group (November 22, 2016). Evaluating information: The cornerstone of civic responsibility.
Stanford History Education Group (November 22, 2016). Evaluating information: The cornerstone of civic responsibility.
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