2 Coiro, J., Dobler, E., & Pelekis, K. (2019). From Curiosity to Deep Learning: Personal digital inquiry in grades K-5. Stenhouse Publishers, Pp. 229, ISBN 978-162531157-3 Reviewed by Laurie McCormick and Dr. Lisa Heaton Marshall University College of Education and Professional Development The timing of this book could not be more pertinent to educators around the globe. Professors and teachers are scrambling to put their classes online because of the Coronavirus. The need for implementing collaborative technology into their curriculum is urgent. Although the concepts and tools in From Curiosity to Deep Learning could be used by all educators, it is a resource manual to help K-5 teachers and library media specialists design class and individual projects that foster collaborative learning with ready-made guides for technology-enhanced lesson plans. Comment by Heaton, Lisa: She asked that you “explicitly” connect this last sentence to the ideas you expressed in the first two sentences – that it couldn’t be more pertinent because people are scrambling to put courses online. How will this resource manual designed for K-5 teachers and library media specialists help with that? Do you think this addition is enough? Comment by lauriejmccormick@gmail.com: No. The Personal Digital Inquiry (PDI) concepts of reading, discussing, collaborating, and reflecting are not new, nor limited to the elementary grades. Coiro mentions that Seneca, a Roman philosopher, taught these methods. However, Coiro, Dobler, and Pelekis spell out in detail how to integrate these concepts into a K-5 classroom by providing resources to inform teachers’ lesson plans, the digital devices and tools relevant for current classrooms, and figures and tables to illustrate each chapter’s concepts. Curiosity’s authors collectively have over 50 years of experience in education. Coiro, a 30-year veteran of the classroom and now a professor of reading and digital literacy at the University of Rhode Island, developed PDI. Dobler, a former library media specialist, now teaches information literacy and language arts at Emporia State University in Kansas. Pelekis, an elementary teacher in Scarsdale, New York, has been implementing PDI for over a decade. The co-authors define PDI, “Briefly, our vision of PDI is one that engages teachers and students in collaborative discussion, analysis, and reflection that leads to knowledge building, knowledge expression, and personal action” (p. 11). Comment by Heaton, Lisa: Where did you move this? I found it in green, meaning it’s moved, a couple times. Comment by lauriejmccormick@gmail.com: Deleted it. Coiro and her compatriots believe students become engaged in their own learning when they are given “voice and choice” (p. x). These experts promote students’ “voice” by having teachers listen to their students’ answers. They foster “choice” by allowing the students’ questions to be studied more in depth during the school year; thereby shaping the class’ curriculum; and choosing what technology they may use in completing their assignments. From Curiosity to Deep Learning is textbook style, with chapter overviews and bulleted learning strategies at the beginning of each chapter. Each The cchapters includes Personal Digital Inquiry (PDI) lessons that contain three elements: Personal—The authors emphasize building relationships with students; Digital—They offer technological enhancements for each lesson; Inquiry—Students reflect and take action. Comment by Heaton, Lisa: Here’s the deleted definition again. Where did it end up? Comment by lauriejmccormick@gmail.com: Deleted it. Comment by Heaton, Lisa: Are you trying to say that… Each chapter includes PDI lessons organized around three elements: Personal, Digital, and Inquiry? The current wording “the chapters include” is making me thing that you are telling me what chapters exist. Changing the state to emphasize “each chapter” would solve it, but only if it’s true that each chapter does this. Comment by lauriejmccormick@gmail.com: Yes. The text is divided into two parts. The chapters in Part I build an understanding of PDI layer by layer. Here the authors It presentincludes models of personal inquiry through analysis and reflection, and an explanation of the PDI triangle, which contains questions for teachers to use to foster student ownership and learning with intent (p. 4). By “learning with intent,” the authors mean “inquiry-based efforts are really geared toward moving students ever closer to becoming self-directed learners empowered to use their knowledge and turn it into action in ways that matter to them” (p. 78). Comment by Heaton, Lisa: You didn’t make the edits that were requested? Comment by Heaton, Lisa: Refer back again to the editors notes and edit this as she requested. Comment by Heaton, Lisa: There aren’t any quotes here, so you don’t need this page number. Part II integrates PDI into teaching and learning. The chapters contain detailed examples of how elementary teachers and library media specialists have applied the PDI process in their classrooms. In particular, Chapter 8 elaborates on the four practices used to create a culture of inquiry within PDI: Wonder and Discover, Collaborate and Discuss, Create and Take Action, and Analyze and Reflect. i Comment by Heaton, Lisa: I think this might fit better at the end of the paragraph. Illustrated in a color-coded circle (p. 18). T. The circle’s center features the question, “How will digital texts, tools, and technologies be used to support and/or facilitate each of these inquiry practices?” By this query, the authors encourage teachers to consider the role that technology may, or may not, play in the teaching and/or learning connected to the PDI framework. Coiro and her crew created a website, bit.ly/PDInquiry, along with a QR code to supplement each chapter’s information. The website contains digital versions of student artifacts and a study guide for each chapter. Comment by Heaton, Lisa: Then, you could edit this sentence with the previous (before the sentence you inserted) like the editor requested. Comment by Heaton, Lisa: I think this might fit better at the end of the paragraph. In the book’s forward, Stephanie Harvey, a scholar in the field of comprehension and inquiry, describes the PDI process: As kids ask questions, they are given time to address them and discover answers. As they work collaboratively, discussions naturally emerge. As they create new ideas and share them, they want to act. Ultimately, they analyze their findings and reflect on them. (p. x) The role of the teacher in PDI is to provide scaffolding for their students’ inquiry processes, but gradually release responsibilities to the students themselves. Instructional scaffolding is a metaphorical term meaning the temporary support teachers offer students to build new knowledge. Once the student masters a task, the teacher gradually removes the support. The challenge for teachers who are planning for PDI is to maintain a balance of giving enough support to guide students’ inquiry, but not so much that the students lose their sense of agency. Comment by Heaton, Lisa: Delete the extra spacing here. One of the goals of PDI is teaching how to create and take action. Teachers have students share their projects with an outside audience, and enable students to become activists in their communities. In a previous article, Coiro elaborated, “The goal of inquiry-based learning [PDI] is to develop engaged citizens, with an integrated focus on fostering individual growth, democratic participation, and social change” (2015, p. 160). To achieve this, one of the class projects included students promoting a local animal shelter’s needs to the public using digital tools. The shelter’s director thanked the students by making them volunteers of the month in her newsletter. The PDI framework should also be distinguished from the personal (or solitary) learning movement; that is, students working alone on their devices for individualized or differentiated instruction. Both methods incorporate student-centered learning. The difference is that PDI emphasizes the “personal” dimension between teacher and student. The authors expounded, “The affective quality of teacher-student relationships is a central and critical motivator of student engagement and performance” (p. 11). For example, media specialist, Beth Dobler, endeavored to develop a relationship with each one of her fourth graders. She did this by offering them choices in selecting an inquiry question, resources, and project format. She reflected: Comment by Heaton, Lisa: Check for an extra space here. Comment by Heaton, Lisa: She asked for an example. I think she wants you to actually describe a learning situation to make the concept clear. If this is happening then what’s the teacher doing? What’s the student doing? Offering choices not only let me get to know their learning preferences but also let the students know that I valued each one as a learner with unique learning needs, which went a long way to developing trust, which led to loyalty. (p. 202) The book includes an extensive Bibliography. , which cites previous work by one of the authors (Coiro, 2015, 2016). Coiro’s own work is referenced along with others’ to support the argument that PDI will deepen learning for students. “Personal learning experiences, however, ‘involve something human whereby the learner initiates and controls at least a part of the learning process’” (Coiro as cited in Coiro, Dobler, & Pelekis, 2019, p. 12). Comment by Heaton, Lisa: You only have a sentence left with this deletion. Refer back to editor’s notes to try to resolve. It doesn’t seem to fit well with what’s coming up in the next paragraph. Comment by lauriejmccormick@gmail.com: Edited it. However, not included in their bibliography is empirical research on student achievement using the entire PDI process as a whole. The research focuses mainly on the educational philosophies behind elements of PDI. For example, Harvey mentions Curiosity uses a “constructivist” approach (p. ix). Constructivism is, based on Jean Piaget’s cognitive development theory that children have prior knowledge and experiences that teachers can build upon. He believes these experiences are learned through social interactions and cultural environment (Cherry, 2019). The core of the PDI framework, inquiry, is founded upon John Dewey’s child-centered teaching philosophy. The authors pull extensively from his work. “Like John Dewey ([1938] 1997), we wholeheartedly believe that learners grow and change with opportunities to identify problems in their community, generate personal wonderings, and engage in collaborative dialogue around these problems” (Coiro, Dobler, and Pelekis, 2019, p. 13). Comment by Heaton, Lisa: Accept all the changes on this page, except this added paragraph. To help educators he authors make it easy on educators to create opportunities for PDI in their curricula, the authorsby includeing appendices with practical tools in their Appendices such as a framework, a self-assessment tool, a questioning tool, a knowledge continuum, and a planning guide, . The authors also include as well as a list of media tools mentioned throughout their book. Each chapter contains vignettes of how teachers applied inquiry-based curriculum in their classrooms as concrete examples for readers to implement. If we employ an accepted model of technology integration, like the Technology Integration Matrix (TIM; ) (Florida Center for Instructional Technology, 2005-2020) to evaluate PDI, Coiro and her co-authors’ strategies tend to achieve the higher levels of technology integration (Adaptation and Infusion). At the Adaptation Level, “the teacher encourages the innovative use of technology tools” (Florida Center for Instructional Technology, 2005-2020, ¶ 2). At the Infusion Level, “the teacher provides the learning context and the students choose the technology tools to achieve the outcome” (Florida Center for Instructional Technology, 2005-2020, ¶ 2). For example, one of the teachers in the book gave her students the option to use one of three digital applications they prefer for their projects (Adaptation), and another used technology stations to enhance her students’ learning (Infusion). Comment by Heaton, Lisa: Go ahead and accept all your changes on this last page. I’d like to read again without them included. Surprisingly, these digital scholars do not emphasize the technology part of their inquiry-based curriculum. The authors state, “It’s our goal in this book to focus on the purposes for using digital resources rather than getting bogged down in particular apps and programs” (p. 109). Instead, they let recommend allowing the lesson to inform which digital application to utilize. They also suggest thateven give teachers have the choice of not using technology when incorporating PDI. For instance, in theirTable 4.2 includes a list of tools for organizing information (Table 4.2). For each format, the reader is given an option of using or not using a technological application or notfor each format (p. 58). FFrom Curiosity to Deep Learning is not a book on how to use guide for educational technologyical devices and apps, or which company’s software works best in the classroom. It does, however, contain several resources a teacher will need to implement the PDI framework. Supporting their curriculum with research and examples, Hence, I believe, Coiro, Dobler, and Pelekis accomplished their goals. They support their curriculum with research and examples from the classroom. They speak the language of their intended audience of elementary teachers and library media specialists, and equip them with practical tools necessary to implement their own PDI curriculum. For educators needing a technology-enriched lesson plan to meeting their current online teaching needs, and for those teaching face-to-face again in the future, this book may helphas much to offer. Comment by Heaton, Lisa: Does this feel right now that the paragraph that used to be here has been moved. References Cherry, K. (August 12, 2019). The four stages of cognitive development: Background and concepts of Piaget’s theory. VeryWellMind.com. Retrieved from https://www.verywellmind.com/piagets-stages-of-cognitive-development-2795457 Coiro, J. (2015). The magic of wondering: Building understanding through online inquiry. The Reading Teacher, 69(2), 189-193. Coiro, J. (2016). Let’s get personal: Balancing talk with technology to truly personalize learning. Literacy Today, 33(4), 6-7. Dewey, J. (1938, 1997). Experience and education. In J. A. Boydston (Ed.), John Dewey: The latter works. 1938-1939, v. 13. Southern Illinois University Press. Florida Center for Instructional Technology. (2005-2020). The technology integration matrix: Table of summary descriptors. University of South Florida, College of Education. Retrieved from https://fcit.usf.edu/matrix/matrix/ Florida Center for Instructional Technology. (2005-2020). The technology integration matrix: Adaptation level, para. 2, University of South Florida, College of Education. Retrieved from https://fcit.usf.edu/matrix/project/adaptation-level/ Florida Center for Instructional Technology. (2005-2020). The technology integration matrix: Infusion level, para. 2, University of South Florida, College of Education. Retrieved from https://fcit.usf.edu/matrix/project/infusion-level