Finally, something I know something about! Rich McCue was in today with an Excel workshop. I adore Excel! It is a great way to manipulate data. There are times of the year, like when making the timetable, that I am in it for hours a day. Not a week goes by that I don’t turn to it to keep track of some type of data. And I am so geekly excited when it comes to finding a new function that does exactly what I need. The image is a screen shot of my timetabling excel spreadsheet, developed with a former colleague. My school has chosen to set our timetable based on student requests, not by creating a timetable first and then trying to slot students into it.

When I taught computers/design, I had the students do some exercises in Excel to understand how powerful and useful it can be and then we would do an assignment in tracking their work for a week (like I do more simply now in Toggl) or budgeting or investing. Part of reaching the top band of my rubric for them was for the requirement to figure out how to do something we had not covered in class exercises: a function or a chart or moving data to another page or spot on their page. Choosing what information to display, how to display it, and inquiring into how to do something they wanted it to do was helpful for their further studies in sciences in particular, where they had data to show in their experiments.

So how does this fit into the 4Rs? If I, the classroom teacher, was the researcher, then my students were unknowingly the researched, providing me with the research of new ways for me to play with Excel (yay!). That’s what I enjoy about teaching an inquiry model – the knowledge is in the room and I don’t have to be the one to find it or impart it to the students. The students were also the readers, because they were free to check out each other’s work as we went so they could also use other students’ ideas; this turned them also into a researcher with multiple collaborators. Round and round we go, just on a tighter cycle than what happens in the type of academic research we are looking into in this course. On the larger, academic research scale, there is a lot of knowledge ‘in the room’, but the researcher is aiming to take it further, where no one has gone before.