Soup to Nuts: The entire research process in 70 minutes

I initially balked at the idea.

Model the entire research process in one lesson? With students producing a paragraph with sources, cited in-text (!) by the end of the block? 

Absolute craziness. 

But, when a teacher approached me with the idea, I said YES. I figured I would come up with something. 

Was it do-able? Kind of.

https://imgflip.com/tag/soup+nuts

Here's how it went down:

The preparation for the lesson consisted of me actually doing  the task: "Find information about Planarian and Light" (grade 9 Science).

By crafting my guiding questions, selecting sources, searching, note-taking, organizing, writing, and citing, I experienced the task as if I were the student. Along the way, I documented my thinking and my solutions to the obstacles I encountered and these became my "talking points" for the lesson.

I created a guide with the process & resources we'd use in class and a shortened version of my work for students to type into as we did the task together.

This was a "listening" and "doing" kind of a class. 

I told them to work with their eyes glued to my large screen and their laptop screen like a tennis match - my screen/your screen - are we in sync?

Their document had the following key steps:

Guiding Questions to gather background information

Source Selection for background 

• Where do YOU like to go to learn something new?

Brief notes for background 

• Probably won't be used or cited in the paper - just to get a sense of what we're talking about

I knew ZERO about the topic, so my background information was extremely basic. The students had done a lab with these little flatworms, so they were way ahead of me. I just briefly narrated my thought process of getting familiar with the topic.

Focused Guiding Questions 

• Narrower questions based on learnings from the background information

Source Selection 

• What types of sources do we need for our new questions - experts? articles?

Here, I explained that I chose targeted databases for them, based on the teacher's request that they find "scholarly" science articles. 

Search for & Gather Information (the meatiest part of the process)

I showed them how to...

• Navigate database filters: "full-text", subject, search within
• Use quotation marks in notes to indicate text cut/pasted from a source
• Use a source number in notes to track sources
• Grab pre-formatted citations
• Paraphrase (they practiced paraphrasing one of my quoted facts)

Organize Information 

• Read over the information gathered
• Determine categories
• Make an outline with the source codes next to the facts/evidence

Write the paragraph 

• Copy the outline and add sentences around the headings and facts, keeping the source numbers intact

This was a revelation to them - to see how I didn't bother to retype any of the evidence from the outline and how the source numbers stayed with the facts.

Create Citations in Noodletools 

• Pre-formatted citations are easy! Copy/paste into the manual section and add the source number in the annotation section - this keeps the sources with the coded source numbers

Create Works Cited and copy/paste it below the paragraph

Add in-text citations to the paragraph 

• Replace the source number in parenthesis with whatever comes first in the full citation

It was a MAD RUSH but somehow we completed a lot of this - but, not all. 

The students did not have time to...

• Take extra notes on their own 
• Organize their information 
• Write it into a paragraph 
• Complete their citations in Noodletools

But, they saw me do these last bits and clicked into how it all fits together.

Here is the teacher version of the document (my full notes) and the student template (forced copy).

For max efficiency, all tabs I planned to show were open to the exact right spot in an incognito window (research guide, student template, my notes, each site, noodletools).

Will I do this again? 

YES but with a much easier topic with two sources only. 

I liked that they saw how one document could contain everything, and that lightbulbs went off when they saw how my red "source numbers" acted as a code that made the in-text citations very easy at the end.

Before I left, I asked the teacher to promise to invite me back to teach about steps we skipped: 

• source evaluation
• strategies for reading scholarly articles
• more database tips and tricks
• more note-taking options
• more practice with paraphrasing
• more question generation techniques 
• (and so forth!) 

She said ok :)