Learning Scenario – High School Research Paper

In high school, I learned how to format and write a full-length research paper. It was taught as a long-term project split up into discrete steps. Each step had its own deadline and was almost treated as a separate assignment altogether. The skills that go into writing a research paper were taught so that we could thoroughly share our knowledge on a given topic in the future. This skill was likely intended to help us with future assignments at the college level.

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To change this assignment into a complex learning project, I would change the project into a class-made book, in which each student would be responsible for writing one chapter.  Within that chapter, the student would be responsible for researching and writing about an Elizabethan era playwright and the backstory behind his writing of one of his plays.  (This gives everyone a unique assignment and the ability to choose from many options that may interest them.)  The content must be properly cited but must also be readable by a general audience.  Before it would be finalized, each chapter would be reviewed by a peer, much like a book to be published is reviewed by an editor first.  The book would then be added to the school library at the end of the project.  Since it’s intended for an outside audience, this lends authenticity to the project and would give students a taste of what it’s like to write a book!

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As an authentic, student-centered project, this redesign falls within the project based learning model.  Students are given the real-world task of making the Shakespearean world more accessible to the general population through writing, and as such they face authentic deadlines for their work just as a writer would.  They would work in teams, through peer editing, to make sure that the book as a whole is well-cited and of high quality.  Since they wouldn’t know about their chosen playwright and the backstory of why they wrote a certain play, they would first have to learn about that through research.  They would also need to rephrase their research into layman’s terms, and for many more advanced students (as these Honors students would be) that might be part of what they learn how to do.  Learning how to teach the material would deepen their own knowledge in the process.  In the process of writing, they would learn how the process of writing a book works as well.  Writing in a real-world context, with a resulting public product, gives students the chance to gain knowledge by engaging with the material over a long period of time (Buck Institute for Education).

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This project also has close ties to Social Constructivism, the theory in which Lev Vygotsky asserted that students learn more from active learning in a social context than when trying to learn the same thing in isolation.  There are many aspects of book writing that students would need to actively learn as they go, and consulting with peers for editing help would teach them more about writing than working in isolation or passively accepting feedback from the teacher would.  Constructivism also ties into this activity because students must build their own knowledge of how to write a book as they complete the project.

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By the way, for any interested teachers who may be reading this and wondering, yes, you can self-publish your class’s book!  I wrote a book as a college Honors project and used Lulu as a platform to publish it.  Lulu even gives you the option to sell your book on Amazon, adding that extra layer of authenticity.  I was very proud to become a self-published author by age twenty-one, and knowing that I was writing a real book made a big difference in keeping me motivated to finish the project.  Writing a full book is not a task that most college students, let alone high school students, would feel up to - my Honors advisor actually doubted I could get it done!  For that reason, having students write one really high quality chapter each is a much more achievable task.