Car Shopping and the Classroom: How my adult experience opened my eyes to an outdated system7/7/2016 For over 2 years, we have been a one-car family. We moved a block away from my school so I was walking to work, and my wife was working from home. We simply did not need 2 vehicles... in fact, we weren't even putting 1,000 miles a month on the vehicles we had, a brand new 2013 Honda CR-V with space for us and our daughter. Fast forward 27 months and add another child, a golden retriever and 2 jobs my wife needs a car for, and it is time to buy a second vehicle. Luckily, it has become my hobby to go used car shopping online. My theory was always no matter how reliable and new our CR-V was, as a one-car family we were only one accident away from realistically needing a second vehicle. My wife thought it was a bit much, but I was having fun with my mobile app equivalent of window shopping. Now, the time has come to actually FIND a second vehicle we will actually purchase, and I am READY. Do you know WHY I am ready (and WHY this connects to the classroom and teaching in any way shape or form)? I have done EXTENSIVE RESEARCH! Research is a critical component of any classroom and obviously it is an important skill as an adult as well, like in car shopping. I found that my research PROCESS mirrored what students are taught to do in school almost exactly. First I needed to find reliable sources. I downloaded apps for cars.com, Autolist and Autotrader to search for vehicles for sale in my area. I downloaded the Edmunds app to research specs and read reviews of different makes and models. I also downloaded the Kelley Blue Book app to compare prices with perceived values. Now I was armed with a wealth of information at my fingertips. All I needed to do was start sifting. I started sifting through all that information in the same way I expect many students start researching... with only a vague idea of what I was looking for and more information than I could possibly digest staring me in the face as I looked at my screen. That brought me to the second phase of my research. Narrowing the field. I had a little more time and freedom to narrow my results than most students are afforded over the course of a research project in school, and I had very few restrictions on my search. The only thing I truly cared about was keeping the price under 5 digits and making sure the car had never been in an accident. Everything else was fair game. Because of this, I went back and forth many times on what style of vehicle I was even searching for. I started with standard 4 door sedans and after a month or so, I had compared every available Accord, Camry, Fusion and Altima in a 150 mile radius (while eliminating Malibus, Impalas, Taurus', Passats, Sebrings and 200s through research of reliability as well)... but 4 door sedans seemed boring. So I asked myself, "Is it possible to actually own a luxury sedan?" They could be had in my price range as long as I could accept slightly higher mileage. BMW is my dream car brand, and I became obsessed with the 3 series and 5 series, but also discovered some Volvo S80s and Lexus LS400s I could see myself in as well. Ironically, that brought me back to a standard 4 door sedan search once again, as I realized the luxury brands might be a little too impractical with high maintenance costs After going in circles several times, thinking about what our CR-V couldn't offer (namely towing ability and 4 wheel drive for the snowy Wisconsin winters) and what would be most adaptable to the possibility of our needs changing again in a few years, the decision came down to the Toyota 4Runner or Honda Pilot...... or maybe Mitsubishi Montero..... or the Nissan Xterra. Crap Dang It! It was happening again! But wait... are we sure those are the most important things for our needs? What do we need to tow? A bike rack every once in a while, a small trailer with awkward sized items from home improvement stores, certainly nothing over our CR-V's 1500 lb towing capacity... and we've never had a problem navigating the snow with its traction control, stability control and ABS. Back to the 4 door sedans?This time it was real though... no more messing around. We are buying a vehicle, like NOW! Decision time! I started to do something that all my education professors told me would be crucial in my career... something they make you do in your Professional Development Plan for renewing your license... something I swore to myself I would never ACTUALLY do because I thought it was lame... I began to "reflect". Uggggghhh... reflection. It always sounded so cutesy and unecessary, yet here I was reflecting on the process I was using in my hobby and how it related to education. After some introspective reflection on the process I was using in my research, I was surprised to find that my reflection actually led me to a major observation. As it turns out, I had proven to myself that the way research is conducted in school projects needs to change. Too many times, students are given a topic, the internet and some books, and told to go learn facts and present their findings. That often ends up being a PowerPoint full of facts they found on the internet and read to an audience. They then get an acceptable passing grade because they found information for all the categories deemed necessary on the directions sheet, stood in front of the class and reported them out while the teacher sat in back and checked boxes on a rubric. That's not meaningful in the least. If I had done my car research as a standard middle school level research project in school, I probably would have been given a handful of vehicles to research by my teacher and told to have at it! I could make a PowerPoint of the vehicles assigned to me and put their horsepower, cargo capacity, towing capacity, available features, safety ratings, and any number of other pieces of information. I could stand in front of a room and read those stats off. If that is what my teacher was looking for, then that's what I could give them... and it would be easy and meaningless. Edmunds gives me all those numbers and more. Cars.com takes up to 4 vehicles at a time and puts columns of those numbers side by side to directly compare. I can find them whenever I want with a couple taps on my smartphone. Clearly there were more meaningful ways of conducting research projects... now it was time for some MORE reflection. I had to ask myself a tough question: "Is this what I am asking MY students to do?" I would like to think that most research I give my students includes some element of student choice within the given topic and is not simply restatement of facts that can be easily found. Students need to be able to find information, but not necessarily memorize it to tell others. They need to use it to solve problems, to evaluate scenarios, to compare and contrast things... and anyone that knows anything about Bloom's Taxonomy or best practice in secondary education SHOULD already know this! The problem is so many IGNORE IT! We've all seen it so often... students spending weeks in the library filling out index cards and note sheets full of facts, then typing those facts onto slides, then standing in front of their peers and telling them the facts they found. We can do better. We NEED to do better because after they finish school, that will not be good enough for the purposes of their research in the "real world". In my own search of how to get away from "Google-able facts" and help my students dig deeper, I have come across a few resources that have helped... The most helpful starting point has been focusing on what kinds of questions students are asking in the early stages of research. A general guideline is to avoid "who", "what", "where" and "when" and focus instead on "why" and "how". I was unable to narrow the field of potential vehicles until I asked myself why we needed a 2nd vehicle and how we were going to pay for it and travel to pick it up. I am promising myself right now that I will NOT force my students to do things that a google search can do for them already. I don't know how many horsepower a 2003 Honda Pilot has off the top of my head. I don't know the backseat legroom of a Mazda6 and I don't have a comprehensive list of every vehicle that features Electronic Stability Control. I have a rough idea because of all the research I did, and I know where to find the exact numbers if I ever did need it. The more important thing for me to know is how to APPLY this info (like knowing the Toyota 4Runner can tow more than triple the weight of our CR-V with more interior cargo space, but would cost on average twice as much as a 4 door sedan and lose 30-40% on gas mileage, whereas a later model 4 door sedan with safety features like side airbags and EBS could be had for much cheaper while sacrificing any extra towing and space). Applying research to a given question or scenario leads to the best ultimate result. If it's a research project in school, you find explanations and reasons for the questions you set out to answer in the beginning of the process. If it's a decision on a major purchase, you come to the most informed decision possible for spending your hard-earned money! Even after over 2 years of constant research though, you know what I have no clue about??? Minivans... Do you know why I have no clue about minivans??? I don't like them, I don't care about them, and I sure as heck wasn't going to buy one... Which brings me to possibly the biggest consideration when assigning a research project to students (especially if I want to truly be like Mr. Dude and make middle school as fun as possible!)... GIVE STUDENTS SOME CHOICE! Choice is probably the biggest motivator in a research project. If a student is not excited or interested in the topic (read: me with minivans), then how hard are they really going to work at uncovering the intricacies of that topic? Obviously it's not always possible to let them pick whatever they want as a research topic, or I would have had plenty of papers about the NBA or OneDirection throughout my career. What you can realistically do is give them smaller choices WITHIN the larger framework. The theme of the research is set in stone, but they can take it in a direction they are more comfortable with. Some examples of what I have done include our Cultural Fair project where students have choices regarding which country their group wants to represent and which subtopics they would like to dig in to individually. Another example is the Made Up North American Football League, which requires all students to meet certain requirements when researching city demographics and using physical geography for long-term planning, but allows individualism in selection of their city as well as nickname, logo, stadium, food and uniform creation. Choice plays a big role in adult-life research as well. I chose to dig into the car research process fully because cars interest me. My wife fully admits she would be more inclined to visit a couple dealerships at most on a random Saturday, find a few vehicles to test drive, and just pick the one that felt best. On the other hand, she became a REALTOR in part because she loved digging through online house listings for all the details in order to find the perfect match for her clients' needs. Houses are not something I would choose to spend inordinate amounts of time researching. Sometimes, especially in smaller research assignments, choice is not that easy to give and the content might be more simplistic. If my assignment requires them to find simpler facts, I try to ask them to ELABORATE on them and make connections with other topics or apply those pieces of information to draw conclusions about some sort of issue. However, there is always room to improve. So in the end, what started as a fun side project for my personal life has become a thought provoking examination of best practice in my secondary Social Studies Classroom. And isn't that what best practice should truly strive to accomplish? If students are researching in ways that mirror the skills they will need in real life applications, they will obviously be better prepared for adult life. If you're a teacher, hopefully you will take a hard look at your own research assignments and "get away from the google-able". If you are a student, hopefully you take a hard look at your research process and adjust to make it better. If you're an administrator... I can't believe I'm about to suggest this... but check up on the current projects being run in your building and make sure they align with best practice. If they don't, enforce some change!
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