Lesson Plan 5

Writing rationale for their projects

  • Objective:
  1. Students write a rationale for their project
  2. Students learn how to write citations for their references
  • Resources:
  1. CaL Note Book
  2. Pencil/Pen
  3. Blackboard + Chalk
  4. Graphic Organiser
  5. 1 Computer with Internet access connected to a projector
  • Time: 2 Periods (45 min each)
  • Plan:
  • Period 1

Step 1. Whole class instruction (20 mins): Teacher tells the class:

What is the rationale? The rationale is the set of reasons provided for conducting research on a particular topic. In City as Lab research project, we will provide two kinds of reasons for doing our research –

  • Reasons why the research question is important to my city
  • Reasons why the research question is important to me personally

In the secondary research lesson last time, we collected reasons why the research question is important to my city. We will use those reasons to write the first part of our rationale. But, before we start writing a rationale let us understand citations in a research paper.

What are citations and how to write them?

A citation is a formal reference to a published source that you consulted and obtained information from while writing your research paper. In CaL, we use the following format to write citations.

Title, Author,Website Link (for internet websites) 
Title, Author, Date of Publishing, Page Number (for books)

Example for citation: The citation is to be provided as a footnote in the word document. See footnote below 

Step2. Rationale and Citations Modelling (20 min): Let us revisit the RQ – What percentage of buildings in BDD Chawl Worli are fire-compliant? The rationale will be written as shown below BASED on the secondary research we did:

TEACHERS PLEASE NOTE:

The teacher will need to model how to write citations included as footnotes. The links are website addresses which can be added to text using Insert->Link feature in Word. The students were asked specifically to store the addresses of the websites they do secondary research from – those will be useful now to write citations.

 

  • Period 2

Step 3. Writing the rationale (45 mins): Every group now writes the rationale giving two reasons for why their research is important to the city (including citations) and 2 personal reasons.. The teacher reads and approves it. After reading the rationale if the teacher feels the RQ needs to be revised, then this is the time to do it.

 

Footnotes:

  1. Fire Safety Checklist for buildings, Maharastra Fire Service Department Website, Link 1b
  2. History of BDD Chawls, MeMumba Blog, Link 2
  3. Less than 1% of Mumbai’s 2.98 Lakh buildings are fire-compliant, Hindustan Times, 01 Jun 2019, Link 3