Susan McCudden, English teacher and Literacy principal teacher at Denny HS is working with Wendy Barr, school librarian to explore how to support pupils in developing their research and note-taking skills. Susan and Wendy collaborated to create a new course which will be delivered to S1 and S2 in session 2019-20 during 1 period each week.

This course has been designed to specifically target pupils’ ability to search more effectively for key information using a variety of non-fiction texts. It is designed to give pupils the opportunity to create useful notes which support learning tasks such as making new texts, designing informative posters, etc. The course also aims to progress pupil capacity to research independently across their learning, helping them understand how transferable these skills are and how they could be applied in different ways for various subject tasks.

Susan and Wendy have designed this new learning opportunity in response to evidence that this was a significant gap for many pupils. Participation in the new course should increase pupil confidence to undertake research and prepare them for the further challenges of senior phase and potentially higher education or training/employment. Wendy has created the poster pictured below to help pupils understand and use the Dewey System.

The images in this blog post come from Susan’s power point presentation teaching materials and highlight how the course integrates specific skills such as: searching for and selecting key information, putting information from texts into own words, summarising information, taking effective notes.

Watch this space for further details…