I developed this project to accompany study of The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I wanted my ninth-grade students to consider multiple points of view about a topic. I wanted them to consider which ideas had the most support, and I wanted them to defend their choices.
I used the WebQuest inquiry learning model of Dr. Bernie Dodge to organize this project, even though WebQuests aren’t supposed to end in research papers. (Apologies, Bernie!) That structure, though, proved just right for this unit.
I knew it was going to work almost from the beginning. I had taken my rambunctious freshmen to our computer lab with instructions about which site to find and what to do when they found it. We were just getting started when someone knocked on the door. I was chatting briefly with the person who needed help when suddenly my “teacher sense” told me something was wrong. I turned around quickly to see what was happening. The room was dead silent. Everyone had found an engaging topic and was READING.
The success continued: research was thorough. Ideas were critiqued. Honest collaboration occurred. Papers were not only written, they were discussed and revised. I couldn’t have been happier with the skills students developed as they worked through this process.
Teachers are welcome to use this project and to link to it. (If you’re going to copy it wholesale, though, please credit me. Fair’s fair.)
|Introduction | Task | Process | Evaluation | Conclusion | Credits |Teacher Page |