The Tikkun Project
Lesson
2
Making a Research Plan
Concept
A good research plan identifies both the written sources and the human sources that can answer our driving questions and interviews require a different kind of preparation than reading does.
Focus Question
Where will the answers to our driving questions actually come from — and who should we talk to?
Knowledge & Understanding Goals
Language, Strand A (Literacy Connections and Applications), Grade 6: Identify a range of print and human sources appropriate to a research purpose.
Thinking & Learning Skills
ATL — Research Skills: Identifying and evaluating potential sources, including primary/human sources.
Learner Profile: Knowledgeable, Reflective.
Context
Directly follows the Question Sort from Lesson 1 turns the prioritized question list into a concrete plan for where answers will come from, including identifying the interview subjects who will feature in Lessons 3 and 4. JIAS (Jewish Immigrant Aid Services of Greater Toronto) is the unit's confirmed partner organization for connecting students with newcomers to interview reach out to arrange guest interview subjects well ahead of this lesson, since coordinating real interviews takes lead time. A brief, honest cross-reference: judging which written sources are actually trustworthy gets its full treatment in Lesson 7 for now, the goal here is simply generating a broad candidate list of both written and human sources; don't worry yet about ranking their reliability.
Lesson Outline
CONSIDERING THE BEST SOURCES OF INFORMATION
In small groups, students list written sources believed to provide reliable information for the unit's driving questions — textbooks, biographies, newspapers, websites, novels based on true stories. Full evaluation of source reliability is covered in depth in Lesson 7 ("Identifying Relevant and Reliable Information in Traditional Reference Materials"); for now, the goal is simply generating a broad candidate list.
IDENTIFYING PEOPLE TO INTERVIEW
Students list people who could provide information or personal perspectives on immigration: staff or volunteers from settlement support agencies (JIAS — Jewish Immigrant Aid Services of Greater Toronto — is the unit's confirmed partner for this); immigration lawyers; friends or family with personal experience; people who have recently moved to Canada. Each student commits to at least one realistic interview contact to pursue before the next research lesson.
REVISING THE PLAN
In the last few minutes, students write in their thought-book anything today's thinking could help with in their action plan. Using a simple finger-scale (1–10), students rate how confident they feel in today's research plan, then write two suggestions for the most important thing to figure out next lesson.
Notes for Teaching and Evaluation
Separating written sources from human sources as two distinct brainstorms, rather than one combined list, matters because they require genuinely different preparation — a website can be read anytime, but an interview subject has to be identified, contacted, and prepared for.
The confidence self-rating is a small but genuine metacognitive check — worth tracking across the unit to see whether confidence trends upward as research accumulates, and worth revisiting explicitly if it doesn't.
Flagging Lesson 7 here (rather than teaching source reliability in full now) is a deliberate sequencing choice, not an oversight — it keeps this lesson focused on breadth (generating candidates) while giving reliability evaluation the dedicated depth it needs later, once students have real sources in hand to practice on.