Empowering students through critical thinking: Eastside Prep students use Search Progress to build digital literacy and metacognitive skills

Kirkland Washington’s Eastside Preparatory School is an independent institution designed to foster independent thinkers. The school, which has 535 students grades 5-12 and 50 teachers, promotes critical thinking, integration of disciplines, hands-on education, and an ethic of innovation. So, when teacher Alicia Hale had a chance to try Microsoft Search Progress and Search Coach, she didn’t hesitate.

Search Progress and Search Coach are Built into Microsoft Teams for Education, which Alicia’s students use to communicate and collaborate. With Search Progress, she can create, customize, and assign research projects. Or create and grade practice assignments. The tool gives her assignment-level insights into students’ research progress. After she creates an assignment, her students can use Search Coach for real-time instructional activities in class and for independent, learner-driven research anywhere. It also provides Alicia with time-boxed insights for individual students as well as her entire class.

Search Progress and Search Coach are Learning Accelerators designed to empower students to think critically and search with confidence. In recent years, the need to build those skills has reached a new level of urgency.

Alicia, who has been teaching for more than 15 years, specializes in Literature and Civics with a passion for empowering students through information literacy. Rapid changes in online behavior and new technologies, including the rise of AI and multiple new social media platforms, have increased pressure to help students search and evaluate information more effectively. “In the past, the challenge was finding enough information,” Alicia says. “Now, there are more videos and websites available than ever before, and the challenge is really to determine which information is of value.”

In the past, Alicia had used time-consuming, complicated methods to manually chart student progress. Search Progress and Search Coach gave her an easier, more effective way to help students build information literacy skills supported by real-time guidance. Jonathan Briggs, Director of Strategy, Technology, and Innovation at Eastside Preparatory School also wanted a highly secure, future-ready solution. He decided to implement Microsoft 365 Education A5 to take advantage of capabilities like Advanced Threat Detection and multifactor authentication plus tools for a rich learning environment. “The value that we get out of Microsoft 365 Education is ridiculously good. It’s affordable for school and has everything we want to do. And when an innovation emerges, we know it will be integrated into the platform.”

Building critical thinking skills

Alicia uses Search Progress to help students track and evaluate their own cognitive strategies and outcomes as well as critique sources of information.  The skill is called metacognition, and it’s challenging for anyone to develop—including Alicia’s middle school students. “The focus needs to be less about content, and more about why they clicked on it,” she says. They must learn to pause and look at the source, funding, and purpose of information.”

Microsoft Search Progress supports metacognition by providing students with feedback and guidance on how to form efficient search queries and analyze their results. Search Progress teaches students patterns that can be applied in traditional search engines like Bing and Google, as well as academic search engines. Search Coach also helps students to understand the meaning and implications of different domains, such as .edu, .org, or .com, and how they affect the credibility of a site.

Using Search Progress, Alicia creates a research assignment in a Teams channel. She can set up filters for students with parameters like date range and file types, and create a custom filter based on her own recommended sites. She can even enable a “fact check” filter, so that students can see what other sources say about their topic.

Turning mistakes into progress

Alicia reviews their work and tracks progress with the Insights feature in Search Progress. Alicia has insights into students’ digital activities, including the sources of information they use, their search prompts, and the number of clicks it takes to identify a resource. Then, she can review the data with students so that they can adjust and refine their research strategies.

Alicia stresses the importance of focusing on building skills, rather than short-term results or goals. “By using Search Coach, students are developing the skills of digital literacy and metacognition awareness that they’ll need throughout their life,” she says. “Students get feedback faster, so that mistakes become information they can turn into progress. They look at the data and identify ways to do things easier and better next time.”

Alicia Hale, Educator, enhancing students digital literacy and expanding their critical thinking with Search Coach and Search Progress

Before using the solution, it was difficult to pinpoint and intervene at moments of distraction or frustration. Now, she can respond immediately with encouragement and guidance as needed. “In the past, we often didn’t realize that students were having a problem with research until it was time to grade,” she says. “But with Search Progress, you can watch kids work in real time and immediately ask if they understand or need help.”

The fast, clear feedback helps students stay engaged and build momentum with each project. Jonathan says, “When it came to finding information online, so much of what we used to do was lecture and hope. Teachers would try to find tools to help, like compiling notebooks or using bookmarks. Search Coach and Search Progress, make it really easy to build and track digital literacy with every assignment.

Jonathan Briggs, Director of Strategy, Technology, and Innovation, facilitated the integration of Learning Accelerators like Search Coach and Search Progress into the learning platform at Eastside Prep

Capturing the “aha” moments

As students become more efficient with searching and vetting sources, they begin strengthening their lateral thinking ability to approach challenges from different perspectives. Alicia points out that lateral thinking is particularly important as search engines become augmented with AI.  “Search Progress does a nice job of continually reminding students to seek multiple perspectives and observe how different search terms or prompts lead the search engine towards different outcomes.”

When Alicia monitors students’ metacognition and lateral thinking behavior, she isn’t just looking for areas of improvement. “It’s exciting when a student realizes why a source is important, and how to use it. Before Search Coach and Search Progress, we’d never been able to capture that lightbulb moment before. Now, we know that students are creating a scaffold for critical thinking.”

Opening horizons

Jonathan and Alicia both look forward to seeing where search abilities and critical thinking take students in the future. Jonathan notes that careers are often built on something as simple, and complicated, as the ability to effectively use a search engine. “For example, if you’re running a technology program, you can’t possibly know everything and you need to be able to find answers. Teaching students to become proficient searchers will be a huge asset in whatever domain they go after.”

Alicia presented on Unified Design for Learning and metacognition at the Northwest Association of Independent Schools Fall Educators Conference in October 2023, where she demonstrated Search Progress and Search Coach. She hopes to inspire more educators to empower students in their own classrooms. “Students can use Search Coach to work with data in their own way, identify the behavior that works best for them, distill that learning, and make it repeatable,” she says. “I don’t know of any other tools that can do this.”