Online Tutorial

Starting PEEL in Practice

Welcome to PEEL in Practice!
To start viewing articles, you need to click on the menu option: “Start the PEEL in Practice”

PEEL in Practice Home Page

Make yourself familiar with the Peel in Practice Home Page
On the left, search through the categories (known as codings).
On the right, the search results will be displayed.

Searching by Coding Part#1

The typical way to search for articles is by coding, this allows you to select and combine search categories from the 21 menus that initially appear.
Suppose you want ideas for getting students working collaboratively and relatively independently in groups.
You could begin by opening the menu labelled Classroom Practices, then from that select the search category Group Work .

Searching by Coding Part#2

This initial selection gives over 200 results – far too many to reasonably sort through.
We can refine the search by selecting more categories relevant to our interest. Here we add the Teacher Concern 9 “Students won’t take responsibility for their learning”.
Notice that the top left box shows our two search categories, while the results list has been culled to fewer matches.

Searching by Coding Part#3

Continue adding coding’s to your criteria until you have a manageable set of relevant results.
In this case, adding two of the Principles of Teaching for Quality Learning:

• • Principle 3, provide opportunities for choice and decision making
  • Principle 6, Encourage learning from other students’ comments

This has reduced the search to less than 20 articles, all of which give ideas for creating a collaborative classroom environment, where students take some independent responsibility for their learning.

Relaxing Search Constraints

On the previous page, we created a search with a combination of four categories.
We can try other combinations by first removing one or all of the categories we have selected.
In the top left box you can click on the cross to the left of any category to remove it from the constraint list.
If you forget to do this, your search will eventually contain a mix of coding’s which yield no results; in this case, just delete each category (in the top left box) in turn to remove them from the search.

Viewing Teaching Procedures

You may notice that some of the results in your search are highlighted in yellow, like below.
These articles do not represent specific teacher experiences; rather they are a description of a generic Teaching Procedure; these are available to search, prefixed by unique codes from A1 to H12.
Like a regular article, you can double-click on these to view the description.

Teaching Procedures

If an article is related to any of these teaching procedures, a link to the generic procedure description will be available from within the article; it appears as the yellow box in the top right corner.

Searching by Issue

If you are just browsing, you can call up specific periodicals or books and you will get all the articles in that issue.
Click the “Issues” button within the application to show a list of all issues.
The search shown has selected “Peel Seeds 36” and the results are all the articles in that issue.
This function is particularly useful when the issue was a theme issue such as how PEEL could be used in year 12 classrooms, or how PEEL can inform the design of longer (80 minute) lessons.
PEEL SEEDS 36 was a theme issue on grammar and writing.

Searching by Keyword

As well as searching the database by category, you can conduct more traditional searches for specific words. To access this functionality, click the “Search” button at the top of the search screen.
Type in a word to search for and select whether to search for articles by title, the author, school or a full text search.
The search shown has produced results for the key word “Geometry”.

Next Steps

This concludes the tutorial for PEEL in Practice. Now that you have familiarised yourself with the basics, you may wish to continue reading some advanced techniques for searching the archives:

• To help you select the search categories that best suit your goals, you can check our precise meanings for any of them in the descriptions of each of the search categories.
• Types of Searches, provides advice on constructing searches that go beyond combining subject and year level, toward searches that are focused on aspects of teaching or learning.
• Selecting a Focus, describes a menu of foci, arranged in four levels, that progressively advance the reader to reflect on student learning in more sophisticated ways.