I recently was in a classroom with a very green teacher, working toward certification via a nontraditional path. They had to stay with their PLC and teach the research paper. Within fifteen minutes, I quickly realized the students had been assigned the task but needed to be taught the process. Luckily, the teacher had just started the unit, and we could discuss what was happening and put a plan in place that made both the teacher and students feel successful.
Here are a few quick steps when tasked with the research paper.
Step 1: Break Down the Process
Take a moment to sit quietly, either alone or in your PLC, to break down the steps YOU would take when beginning to write a research paper. For example, I might list things like:
Now, there might be steps on this list that I’ve missed or that you may replace with something else. It depends on the demands/expectations of your PLC/district, the level of your students, and the tight or loose vertical alignment within your school. For instance, I didn’t mention how to properly embed an in-text citation or how to cite on a works cited page properly. Deborah Dean provides a great list of strategies she used in writing her book, What Works in Writing Instruction: Research and Practice. She explains that “there is not a master list” of writing strategies; yes, “some strategies are more universal than others,” and some “are more helpful in relation to a specific genre or task”. The key is to offer students various ways to research a topic, allowing them to choose the best approach to achieve a specific purpose.
Step 2: Understand Your Students
What do you inherently and/or with experience know about kids?
Each of these can become teaching points that enable your students to become more independent researchers and take some of the workload off your shoulders. Let’s face it, no teacher wants to write 120 different research papers every year!
Step 3: Consider the Big Picture.
This is an excellent opportunity for vertical conversations, but you can still do this work if you are a lone wolf. Consider these things:
Think of this analogy: When you teach a kid to ride a bike, you give them a bike that physically meets their needs, like a 14-inch bike with training wheels. You would never give a five-year-old a 24-inch ten-speed and expect them to be riding it with one hand, drinking from a water bottle, and yielding to traffic after a few weeks. Yes, this might be the ultimate goal, but it won’t happen until a few years of practice and physical and mental growth are cultivated along the way. John Hattie refers to this as “SOLO (structure of observed learning outcomes) method developed by Biggs and Collis (1982) to explain the movement from surface to deep learning as a process”. He simply explains that students will begin with one idea before moving on to many ideas. Then, they can consider related ideas and extend them into their writing, conversations, or other areas.
Step 4: Teach the Process, Not Just the Task
These previously mentioned items can become individual teaching points for the research paper. The key is to teach the process, not simply assign a task such as “Write a research paper.” Consider these ideas for lessons:
|
What |
How |
Purpose |
|
Teach students ways to find a topic. |
They might spend a day or night scrolling through social media, watching the news, reading a paper, or listening to conversations with others to look for interesting topics or trends. Have them bring those ideas and issues to class and spend less than 1 minute introducing them and thinking about different ways they could research the topic. |
Students can replicate across contents and contexts. Students choosing topics that interest them will yield better final products because they will be more invested in uncovering the truth or proving their positions. |
|
Searching for topics. |
Choose a class topic, brainstorm different words you could put in a search engine, and model this process. Don’t discard any suggestions made by students. Show them the results when you use their suggestions - even if they lead to dead ends. *Note: Using Ebsco or a database is cumbersome, so if students have not mastered independently reading an article to extract information for their research, you may need to start there and forgo the impulse to force them to use a database. |
Students learn to think like researchers. They can be independent, gather more credible information, and apply it across various contexts and content. |
Consider creating quick lessons like this for each item you listed above. Some might take more time than others, and some might be able to be skipped. Some might only need to be taught to a small group of students. In any case, if your students are not producing a solid research paper (for the expected grade level) entirely independently, it is most likely because they don’t know how to work through the process, so you need to teach them.
It is also important to note that throughout this process, the teacher must provide students with practice with each of these skills or strategies. Students should not be trying out a skill on their final product. Kelly Gallagher and Penny Kittle have co-authored two books, 180 Days: Two Teachers and the Quest to Engage and Empower Adolescents and 4 Essential Studies: Beliefs and Practices to Reclaim Student Agency, that offer examples of ways teachers can provide opportunities for practice. 180 Days provides examples of informative and argumentative writing opportunities that would build students' writing to tackle a full research paper independently. 4 Essential Studies offers research expectations and questions students can consider in the process.
References
Dean, D. (2021). What Works in Writing Instruction: Research and Practice, 2nd Ed. National Council of Teachers of English.
Fisher, D. (2017). Teaching literacy in The visible learning classroom: 6-12 classroom companion to Visible Learning for Literacy. Corwin, a SAGE Company.
Gallagher, K., & Kittle, P. (2022). 4 essential studies: Beliefs and practices to reclaim student agency. Heinemann.
Gallagher, K., & Kittle, P. (2018). 180 days: Two teachers and the quest to engage and empower adolescents. Heinemann.