More Ideas for Graduation Project Experience

GPE! I like it, and you're absolutely correct that we need to help our students see it as an experience in their learning journey. I agree that the pledge wall needs to be tactile to be more accessible and visible. I remember the art teacher created a very colorful and inviting goal chart last year for the couple of seniors she was advising. It charted the progress on all the subgoals of the graduation project. She hung it right outside of her classroom so that everyone passing by could see it. Wonder if we could take that idea and run with it?

I've been remembering one of the highlights from Katie Wood Ray's keynote speech last October at the NCETA Conference in Charlotte, NC. She elaborated on the importance of having mentor texts for students to study as they are writing in different genres. Since research papers are still a "relatively newer" genre for our students, we need to find models of research papers for them to study. The question is where? I have some of the collections from last year's sophomores, but the majority are not anywhere near the length our seniors' papers are required to be. I'd like to have models that highlight organizational and framework possibilities such as pro/con; cause/effect; causal analysis; definition; problem/solution and argument. In truth, most papers will have components of several if not all of these organizations, but I do believe that it's important to have students purposely set their papers up with one of these organizations from the beginning. Otherwise, you end up getting a lot of papers that are more "reports" versus research papers. We need to talk about how to get them to understand RE-search as a dialogue where they enter with a voice and discuss with the experts on selected topics. DeSena has an excellent book on this (see http://www.ncte.org/store/books/126267.htm to order a copy which I highly recommend). Last spring, I participated in NCTE's webinar with DeSena. I believe I still have a copy of the archived webinar I can share. She discussed at length that a way to help students avoid plagiarism is to truly understand the differences between research and reports. Afterall, at its foundation, research is for the purpose of answering (a) question(s). Students need to start with generating questions they are trying to answer.

Ok, so here's the challenge: where do we find outstanding research papers that can serve as model or mentor texts for our students? We need a diversity in terms of subject and reading level. I spent some time perusing some of the sources in google scholar, but so many of them are at a very high level. I'm not sure most will be accessible to our students. By the way, we do need to add google scholar to our list of sites to show students. We should go ahead and start building our wiki for this group. We can add resources to it for our students. Speaking of resources, I found this link for teacher resources: http://www.ncte.org/collections/collegeresearch
Although it's geared toward teaching research in the first two years of college, it does appear to have some benefits for us.