S5 E14 - It's Time to Say Goodbye to the Independent Research Project

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Hello and welcome to the Structured Literacy Podcast, I'm Jocelyn and I'm recording here in Tasmania, on the lands of the Palawa people. A couple of episodes ago, I shared a simple tool with you that can help you gain clarity on what you're teaching and structure successful learning opportunities for your students, and that tool was the Curriculum Organiser. If you didn't hear that episode, go back to Season 5, Episode 12, The Secret Weapon for Effective Retrieval Practice.

Goodbye, Independent Research Projects

Today, I'd like to go a little further in discussing what it takes to set students up for success by making what might be a controversial declaration. I think it's time we said goodbye to the Independent Research Project, in its current form.

Now, the Independent Research Project is a core feature in many classrooms, especially in upper primary and secondary. It's been used as a way for students to explore topics of particular interest to them, and the intention has been to often give them practice with critical thinking skills. This idea is grounded somewhat in inquiry pedagogy but also in some of the ideas around 21st-century skills that we need to be building for students.

The Research Says

What research tells us is that critical and creative thinking is grounded in knowledge. The bit that's missing is that we have been thinking that we could give these projects to students, and they will be motivated by the choice and engaged by the opportunity to follow their own thoughts and interests, and then they will naturally come to the learning somewhat on their own. The problem with this is that, while we do construct knowledge over time, as in we add new things to our existing understanding, this is a cognitive process. It's not an effective or successful method of teaching, though for many years we have been encouraged to use it and the name of it has been constructivism. I want you to know that it's entirely possible to have a handle on the elements of literacy instruction that make it explicit and robust and yet still not see how this relates to other subject areas we teach, and I remember being in that exact place myself.

The difference between the sort of teacher I am now and the sort of teacher I was then is that I now understand the principles of explicit instruction rather than just knowing what they look like in one particular curriculum area. So it's ok to say, Do you know what, I think I may be a little stuck in a rut here and it's time to change things. That's going to feel a little scary. We've all been there and been scared and we need to go there. We need to continue to go there because our students need to feel supported. When we give our students Independent Research Projects, what we are essentially doing is asking them to teach themselves when they are novices. The underpinning principles of cognitive load theory by John Sweller and many others in the space reminds us that novice learners learn best with fully guided instruction and that for most of a student's life, all the way through primary school, secondary school and undergraduate education, they are novices in what they are learning.

Emotion in Learning

And there's another element to consider here: the role of emotion in the learning process. I'm going to share some insights from David Sousa's book, How the Brain Learns, now in its sixth edition, and I've previously shared this in another episode of the podcast. I highly recommend getting a copy for your school to use in your professional learning work. It's really easy to read and explains complex cognitive processes in a way that we can all understand.

Sousa tells us that there's a hierarchy of response to sensory input.

Any input of higher priority diminishes the processing of lower priority data. The brain's main job is to help its owner survive, and emotional data takes high priority. When an individual responds emotionally to a situation, the older limbic system, stimulated by the amygdala, takes a major role and complex cognitive processes are suspended.

So those are direct quotes from the book. In other words, when we feel heightened emotion related to threat, when we're feeling anxious about being put in the deep end of a learning situation that we do not feel prepared for, any thinking about new learning is put to one side, while our brain processes the perceived threat. Sousa says, "Emotion is a powerful and misunderstood force in learning and memory." Another way of stating the hierarchy is that, before students will turn their attention to cognitive learning or the curriculum, they must feel physically safe and emotionally secure in the school environment.

I've said for many years that you cannot separate learning from emotions. They are, in fact, inseparable. If students don't feel supported, if they don't feel a sense of efficacy in their work, they're not going to be able to engage in what we want them to do, and what we end up seeing is a range of behaviours that are counterproductive to strong learning. I also need to mention that it doesn't matter how many times we say we are here to support you, it's ok if you don't know, or any of the other things we say to try and make students feel better. If we are not structuring the learning experience as one that is safe and secure for students, none of those things that we say matter.

We, with the best of intentions, can sometimes be responsible for pushing students into the fight-flight-freeze response with the tasks we assign. This looks different for different children.

Some hold it all in giving you a smile on the outside, then they go home where significantly terrible things can happen, such as self-harm, and this has been on the rise in our student populations for a while now.

Others pick fights with classmates to get themselves kicked out of the learning environment. The fight is not just avoidance because they don't want to do work. We've actually triggered the flight response, which means they will do whatever it takes to escape that threatening environment.

Some children argue with you, that's your classic fight.

And the freeze can often look like sitting without demonstrating any emotion or simply sitting with a pen in hand for 45 minutes with just three words written at the end of the period of time.

Looking Back...

I look back and I'm more than a little ashamed at my best attempts at assignment creation for Year 5/6 students, but we all have to acknowledge that we haven't always had the information needed to make sound judgments, and we really do need to forgive ourselves. Not brush it off, sit in the feeling of discomfort, it helps us find the reason to go on and do the hard work of improving. But we can't sit in judgment of ourselves forever. Nobody is able to move forward and grow from a place of deficit. So recognise when things haven't been terrific, own it, it's good, and then make a plan for what's going to happen. You do not have to change everything tomorrow, but we do need small steps implemented consistently well for our students to learn.

A few more points from Sousa: data affecting survival and data generating emotions are processed ahead of data for new learning, which in school is called curriculum.

If we want any chance of our students focusing on strong learning, we have to create a learning environment and culture in our schools and classrooms that says, "It's ok, I've got you, I'm not going to let you go into the zone of confusion and if you're heading there, let me know, it's my role to adjust how things are happening so that you have desirable stretch and desirable difficulty, but not overwhelm."

I have tutored for the last almost 20 years and to my older students, the secondary students who I have tutored, to every one of them I have said, "It is not your job to pretend that everything is ok. If I'm not making sense, what I need you to do is tell me if this is confusing. My job is to find a different way to help you understand." And for so many of them, you can see the relief physically: the shoulders lower, the face relax, they lean forward because they're sitting in this zone of confusion for so much of the time at school and they think that that's just what learning is like. It doesn't have to be.

Finally, how a person feels about a teaching or learning situation determines the amount of attention devoted to it. Emotions interact with reason to support or inhibit learning. So this is from Sousa again. If we feel we have a high level of self-efficacy, if we feel empowered, knowledgeable and strong, we'll pay attention to learning. But if we feel out of our depth (this is back to me now), if we feel out of our depth, that we're drowning or approaching overwhelm, we will disengage and not pay attention. And this is as true for adults as it is for students.

So supporting everybody in the school as we move through new phases of learning has to be a priority. Supporting doesn't mean doing for, it means creating enabling structures and supports that help people to engage fully, whether they be student in the classroom or a teacher at the front.

Staying Afloat

Now, the common Independent Research Projects that we're used to could include investigating a country and geography, that was my old fallback, or, for older students, taking an area of the curriculum and sourcing knowledge on it from the internet. Now, critical thinking is often the justification given for these projects, along with students learning to manage themselves independently, and often, increased engagement through personal interest is cited as a reason for this kind of instruction. However, if a student is a novice in swimming, we generally don't let them paddle in the shallow end for a bit and then just throw them in the deep end. We make sure they can stay afloat before we ask them to do harder things, and it needs to be the same for learning. But this idea of that common Independent Research practice where we just let the students loose and say go fly free little people and find knowledge, only works if the students are coming to the work with an established deep level of knowledge about the topic, if they've already acquired all the skills of independent work and, frankly, if they're not children.

Most children in classrooms, including secondary, require guidance and explicit teaching to learn deeply and effectively. They need us, as their teachers, to be their GPS in the knowledge building journey. Asking a student to go off and learn information on their own is a little bit like giving them a street directory that we've removed the index from.

Now for those of us on the younger side, a street directory is a book full of maps, and if you wanted to go somewhere that you hadn't been to before and you didn't know the way, you looked up the street in the index in the back and then you located the particular map. You then had to figure out how to get from the page you were on in the directory to the page you wanted to go. So for students, it's like we've taken the index out. We haven't even told them how to find the end point.

The Zone of Confusion

Independent Research Projects leave our anxious children, our children who struggle with focus and our children with literacy and numeracy difficulties, drowning in a sea of confusion. I recently read a blog post suggesting that in mathematics teaching children should spend most of their lesson time in the zone of confusion, and I have to say that just doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. The zone of confusion is also the zone of overwhelm, disengagement and anxiety, and this isn't just my opinion. Cognitive load theory and information processing theory tells us that we need to carefully manage the load on students' working memory. Everything new has to pass through working memory and be rehearsed and practiced to get it into long-term memory. And if things have to be processed through working memory, we can manage about two, maybe at a big stretch three, novel bits of information at a time. So when we ask students to investigate a topic of their choosing, we're basically guaranteeing that a good proportion of students will experience significant cognitive overload.

However, my call for an end to this common practice in its current form doesn't mean we're not encouraging students to think about interesting and motivating topics. It doesn't mean we're not teaching children skills of reading and gathering information. It doesn't mean we don't expect some form of You Do within the I Do, We Do, You Do structure. Of course, all of those things are important. We need to engage students in opportunities to think critically. That's essential. If we're not critical thinkers, we believe everything we're told, but the core thing that builds the capacity to think critically is knowledge and as teachers we need to manage that journey and check for understanding all the way through to make sure that our students are actually building the knowledge we need them to, to do all of that thinking.

An Alternative

I have an alternative, I'm not just here to complain. I think that we can get a win-win within structured teaching and some student choice and agency in the work. We can have high engagement, high levels of interest and learn important skills without throwing students completely into the deep end and waiting for them to sink or swim. We also don't have to structure every single thing so that the tasks the students produce at the end are cookie cutter and you can't tell one from the other. But I'd like us to think a little bit about the sinking thing.

For many of our students, those who struggle with anxiety, reading difficulties, communication challenges, focus issues or anything else that impacts self-esteem, they've been sinking for years. It's our role to build trust with and for them. You may have heard me say before, explicit teaching is saying to the students, I've got you right here in my hands, and if you've seen me live, I actually put my two hands cupped next to each other and say, it's ok, you're going to be ok, and that's a critical question to ask when reflecting on our curriculum, organisation and tasks. Are we holding students carefully in our hands so they can trust us with their vulnerability, to take some learning risks to stretch out from where they are now, or are we throwing them in the deep end? I'm not talking about babying children, I'm talking about managing the learning environment. So there is desirable difficulty and appropriate stretch, not overwhelm. So what's my solution, I hear you ask. Well, let me unpack a couple of ideas for you. Let's look at alternatives to the Independent Research Project that still enables students, particularly in Years Five to Ten, to explain of interest and stretch a little without that deep end I've mentioned.

Within a text based unit, so a literature unit in English, one approach that we've used is to have teachers work together to plan and do some of the teaching. When working with a school and coaching teams in writing their own literature units, this has been particularly useful for teaching persuasive speeches, for example. So we've had two year 5/6 teachers both teaching their students about persuasive speeches in their own classrooms. They teach all the vocabulary, building the knowledge, building the speech structures structures, the language functions, all the background knowledge and skills required to write a persuasive text, including examining exemplars and discussing them as worked examples. All that deep work is done in your own classroom.

When it's time for students to write their own speeches, and because it's in text based units, it's a good idea to have both reading and writing as a focus here, here's where we create that win-win of student choice and teacher guidance. So the teachers work together and create a list of a couple of ideas for topics that they think may be appropriate for the students, and then the students collectively suggest a couple more. So you may end up with a list of five or six potential topics on the board. Then get both classes together and all the students vote on their favourite ideas, continuing until you've narrowed the list to two. You've distilled your list from five or six and now you're ready for the next part of the unit.

When students begin writing their speeches, they split up during English time, so one teacher manages one topic group and the other teacher manages the other. This enables students to have choice over their speech topic, but also allows teachers to ensure that students have the required knowledge of that topic. So these topics could be societal issues, school issues, whatever's appropriate and will work for that group of students. The teacher then actively builds the knowledge of the issue with those students over a lesson or two. When it's time to write, teachers use differentiated strategies to provide appropriate support for different students. Those who can write independently do so, while students who need step-by-step support receive it. Then students read their speeches to each other back in their own classrooms, meaning you have a range of topics being presented, not just cookie cutter speeches being delivered.

This win-win approach can be applied to various curriculum areas. But before I elaborate, let me address the question: What if you have a super bright student in the gifted space who wants to explore a topic outside of the two that were voted on? Well, I would imagine you would let them. The difference here is we're talking about desirable difficulty and appropriate stretch for all students in the class. Having one teacher-guided topic that they apply their learning to might be too much scaffolding for a gifted student. If a student can manage to write a speech on a different topic, let them. They probably have knowledge in their heads that other students don't have anyway. Just make sure that you're fact-checking what they're including and find a way to support them in exploring the topic. It's fine for that student, it's just not appropriate for everybody.

An Alternative in Other Areas

Let's think about applying this win-win thinking to other curriculum areas. So in HASS, or Humanities and Social Sciences, whether you're exploring history, economics, business or geography, you, as the teacher, can teach the deep knowledge students need about the topic. Make sure they have the vocabulary, make sure you check for understanding throughout, build their knowledge so they understand what's happening and then explore the topic from a couple of different perspectives. This is deep learning, not just a few weeks of disconnected tasks one after the other. So, for example, if you're teaching about climate change and rainfall impacts, there's a lot of knowledge to build and many different perspectives to explore. You spend time doing that with students, ensuring they understand, and only then might you have them work with a real world problem to suggest solutions or think critically about. At that point students might adopt particular perspectives, the farmer versus the factory owner versus the consumer versus the politician. If they have the knowledge to do that, they could choose which perspective to write from. See the difference? We still have teacher guidance and we still have student choice, but the teacher has made sure everyone has the prerequisite skills and knowledge before asking them to produce something independently.

Let's switch back to English before we finish up. After exploring a text thoroughly, unpacking the characters, discussing how the author brought the story to life and teaching about language features, structures and functions, and checking that the students understand, not just assuming they do because you've done it, you could take a scene from the book and ask students to choose a character through which to explore and unpack the scene. Again, we have student choice, but we aren't throwing them in the deep end. And for that gifted student, well, they might take the perspective of a character not introduced in the book at all, someone a step removed or briefly mentioned in the text. Perhaps the character we can infer would exist but hasn't been directly explored in the story. We don't have to abandon critical thinking and perspective taking. We don't have to abandon student voice or student agency. What we need to do is ensure that these elements are implemented in ways that support cognitive load. It really is time for the Independent Research task in its current form to be banished to the archives.

If you're still unsure after hearing this episode, I want to ask you a question.

At University, when you were studying for your teaching degree, what did assignments look like? Were you asked to come up with your own topic, or were you presented with knowledge, information and vocabulary and asked to answer one of several pre-developed questions? That's how it was for me. I wasn't handed a task that said go figure out what you might like to do.

Even as adults, we're not asked to do those things without high levels of support. In University, if we want to explore a question that isn't one the lecturer has presented, we have to get it approved to ensure we're on the right track and we'll be successful. And yet somehow we expect our students to do things we don't even ask adults to do.

When we think about it like that and consider student emotions and what it takes to be successful, I think there's no question that these Independent Research tasks in their current format really have to go, but teachers need support to consider alternatives, and that's what I hope you get from this podcast episode. As always, I hope that teaching is enjoyable and invigorating for you and that you can work with that sense of purpose of improving children's lives that we all aim for. We can't do it on our own. Together, everyone really does achieve more, and on that note I'm going to say happy teaching everyone. I'll see you next time. Bye.

Helpful Resources

S5 E12 - The Secret Weapon for Effective Retrieval Practice

References: 

Sousa, D. (2022) How the Brain Learns (6th Ed). Corwin. 

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