News from The Arthur Holt Library
Trinity term is always a busy one for our senior boys. Not only is it the final term of face-to-face teaching for our Year 12s, it is also the term when the Year 11 IB Diploma Programme boys begin work on their Extended Essays.
The Extended Essay is a 4,000-word piece of independent research that every boy on the Diploma Programme must complete in order to graduate. It can seem like an onerous task to students unused to independent research, but it teaches them an invaluable set of skills and almost always delivers genuine growth.
Together with the IB leadership team, The Arthur Holt Library has delivered a number of workshops designed to get the boys started. This week, we focused on ideation, or the process of identifying and exploring potential areas for research. The boys were asked to brainstorm ideas, explore each other’s suggestions and then to settle on a topic area that they plan to explore in more depth next week.
We used a scaffold called a Lotus Diagram to help them to reach beyond what they already know into those areas where they need to engage in further reading and build their understanding. Next week, we will guide the students through their preliminary research. They will be asked to complete an annotated bibliography, which lists those sites and research articles that they have accessed and what key pieces of information they learned from them.
The boys will then be allocated a supervisor in their individual subjects and we in The Arthur Holt Library will continue to support them with advice on conducting deeper research, accessing Academic Database, tracking their sources and making sure that they reference them correctly.
Of course, we are also on hand to support our HSC students. Our Teaching and Learning Librarians have delivered a series of lessons on choosing texts and finding secondary sources to the Extension English students. They were told how they can access critical essays and use them to develop their own arguments. They were also shown how important an understanding of historical context can be when analysing a text.
One final word to all of our holiday borrowers! If you’ve been issued a fine for your overdue books, it doesn’t mean that it’s too late to return them. Just bring the books back to us and we will happily refund the fines.
“Everything you need for a better future and success has already been written. And guess what? All you have to do is go to the library.” – Henri Frederic Amiel
