Carbon in Our Everyday Lives

This Guided Inquiry Quest is designed as a collaborative research experience built around research clubs and partnerships. Organizing the inquiry in this way has two main aims. First, it helps students develop greater independence and autonomy as researchers by making decisions about what to investigate, how to divide the work, how to manage their responsibilities, and how to move the group’s inquiry forward. Second, it develops the skills students need to synthesize information across multiple texts, make connections between sources, and accurately attribute information in both discussion and written work.

As the grade level begins the unit, students may first take part in shared provocations, discussions, or lessons that introduce the three broad streams explored in this Quest: Carbon and Fast Fashion, Carbon and Technology, and Carbon and Food Production. Students then choose the stream they would like to investigate further. Organize the grade level so that each classroom becomes the class group for one stream, bringing together students who have chosen that area. This structure allows the classroom teacher to guide the whole class group at key points in the inquiry, while smaller research clubs and partnerships investigate different aspects of the same shared stream.

Within each class group, divide students into smaller research clubs. Help the class identify subtopics it wants to understand more deeply and agree on one area of focus for each club. This is also a useful opportunity to reinforce the difference between questions that help students find out a fact and questions that require deeper research across multiple sources. A question scaffold such as a Q-Matrix can help students move from factual questions toward questions that ask them to explain, compare, investigate causes and consequences, make connections, or consider different possibilities.

Within each research club, students work through a repeated cycle of agreeing on the next research focus, reading and taking notes independently, checking in with a research partner, returning to the research club to compare findings and synthesize information, and setting goals for the next round. Students work with a research partner who reads the same article so they can compare notes, revisit the text together, discuss interpretations, and decide what is important to bring back to the group.

Research club meetings give students regular opportunities to take increasing responsibility for driving their own inquiry forward. As students become more comfortable with the structure, they should make more of the decisions about what to investigate next, how to divide responsibilities, what findings are important to bring back to the group, and how the group will share and build on new learning. Partner check-ins support this process informally between meetings.

Use research club meetings to teach source attribution as part of authentic research. Encourage students to refer back to texts, name where information came from, compare what different sources say, and distinguish between information from a source and their own interpretation. In discussion and written work, students can use language such as “According to…,” “The article explains…,” or “This source suggests…”. They should also learn to return to original texts to verify information and use evidence from multiple sources to support developing ideas.

If the curated Quest articles no longer answer the group’s developing questions, introduce additional trusted sources such as Inquessapedia, reference books, student-safe AI tools, broader Inquessa Cove resources, or other teacher-approved sources. Students can apply the same habits of note-taking, source attribution, comparison, and synthesis to the new information they gather.

At useful points, bring the larger class group together to compare what different research clubs have learned, and create opportunities for students to make connections across the three carbon streams. The final direction of the inquiry can grow out of the students’ research rather than requiring one predetermined product.