The Silver Bullet? One Idea for Saving Blogging from the Werewolf
Saturday, 10 March 2007 Clay Burell 
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[So I like to mix metaphors. Dracula becomes the Werewolf. Sue me.]
I just had a fantastic Saturday morning meeting with Ms. Halvorsen, a fellow high school English teacher, and Dr. Clapper, our school director and former Curriculum Director, and we discussed the question that has been my obsession this week: Now that we have our own school WordPress MU blog-site, how do we keep teachers from ruining it by making it feel like homework instead of authentic writing?
Here’s a rough draft of what we came up with:
1. The school will create a blogging policy that defines the roles of teachers, students, parents, and the philosophy of blogging at our school.
2. Student blogs–only one per student, which spans their entire tenure at our school, and which they will download and keep when they leave our school–will be assessed only for the quality of writing, and “homework” questions will not be assigned on blogs.
3. English teachers will be the only teachers to assess and give credit for the blogs. They will use a common assessment tool like the 6+1 Traits of Effective Writing from k-12 to help develop student writing. Content is open for the student to freely choose, within educational parameters (to be clarified). The idea is for them to re-connect on their blogs the horribly disconnected, compartmentalized learning produced by our current “factory school” paradigm.
4. This is the exciting part: The policy will begin with this year’s grade 9 class. They will continue blogging about their “educational journey” until they graduate in grade 12. Their grade 12 experience will contain a “Capstone Project” (think “IB extended essay” meets “college application essay”) in which they write a “My Educational Journey Through High School” essay (which, if I’m around, will of course be digital and multimedia) that reflects on and synthesizes the essence of their educational path as seen through their blogs.
This is, again, the rough idea. Thanks to Linzel, Barbara, Jeff, Chris, and everybody else who helped shape it.
I like this about it: it’s a four-year “writing workshop.” It encourages student construction of their own interdisciplinary meanings, the return of the parts to a student-synthesized whole. It “leaves the door open” (hat-tip to Chris Watson) for student writers to authentically experience all the stages of becoming a writer, ups and downs together, over four years–so it’s developmental. As Linzel suggested, it explodes the artificial boundaries of “September to June,” “forget last year” that our schools have set up.
And it throws a cookie to parents: a hyperlinked culminating writing project, online, for students to use for their college applications. A blog is worth a thousand essays.
Gotta run. Feedback?
[Photo credit: bbaltimore at Flickr.]
- “Blogger-Training School” for a Student “Blogging License”: A Silver Bullet?
- An Idea to Elevate Student Blog-Writers: Giving them space on Support Blogging.com
- On Classroom Blogging 3: Sucking It Dry: Teachers as Vampires
- Teacher Think-aloud on Student Blogging (a Fresh Start)
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Tags: lessons, student 2.0, web 2.0/ read-write web Print This Post
No. 1 — March 10th, 2007 at 6:43 pm
This is where we start exploring pedagogy. I like the way you have thought this through and with a plan in place you have a chance to really capture the impact of your practice. I may go a different route but your model think aloud and think through will help me put a plan in place too. It will be interesting to watch this all develop and to explore the approaches adopted by each community.
The one thing that I believe is essential for most situations will be – One blog per student. We currently have one blog per student and one per class because we also use blogs for class scribes.
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No. 2 — March 11th, 2007 at 3:04 am
I really like most of the guidelines. Its important to restrain the teachers from ‘killing’ the enjoyment. Although I do not use blogs personally [I'm a wiki guy - I've never been good at periodic journal writing - see scientist.wetpaint.com], I think the aspect of English only is a tad limiting. Surely there is a way to allow integration of science topics isn’t there? [or any other subject]. Perhaps special occasions may warrant blog entires about science issues that may be ‘graded’ on two sets of criteria – a science ‘ciorrectness’ scale and a ‘grammar’ scale? like many of us I’m thinking out loud.
??
Cheers
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No. 3 — March 11th, 2007 at 3:51 am
Barbara–
Please do tell about the “different route” you tease us with, you vamp
(I’m a “good idea” vampire.)
Linzel–
I didn’t touch on this enough in my sketch on this post when I said only this:
it’s a four-year “writing workshop.” It encourages student construction of their own interdisciplinary meanings, the return of the parts to a student-synthesized whole.
So the idea, stated more fully, is for students to be assessed for how they re-constitute in their blogging the meaning of the whole world we so depressingly dismember in our schools. They write more from wonder and meaning-construction–the “What’s it all about, Alfie”–than from rehearsing the “correctness” of content.
I see your point about excluding all but English teachers. That’s not the idea, anyway, exactly. The idea is more for a sort of exploratory writing mentor to “assess” in its beautiful, classic, “sitting with” sense, the directions students independently take in the world of holistic, interdisciplinary “reading the world of idea”–coaches on the levels of finding and pursuing self-compelling questions, and writing about them effectively.
If those “exploratory writing mentors” are science teachers instead of English teachers, that’s fine indeed. Perhaps they should be. (The bugabear of which “class grade” this work applies to points to English, though, doesn’t it? grrrr…ading s&@)ks sometimes, doesn’t it?)
And there’s no reason all teachers couldn’t read whatever and whenever students wrote about their particular discipline. But really, to me, this is not about reading and assessing for correctness of disciplinary content as much as it is, again, mentoring a writerly comfort with testing ideas, questions, impulses, epiphanies.
The poet Keats famously got his “history” wrong when he wrote about “Cortes, / Silent, upon a peak in Darien” in “On First Reading Chapman’s Homer.”
But the poem itself is a wonder and timeless, despite the fact that Keats would have been docked a few points on his history test for saying “Cortes” instead of…gee, “Pizarro,” is it? Or some other inert name?
Back to your concern about exclusion of all content areas, though, I’ll repeat: students will be guided toward re-weaving the fabric of learning we’ve all unraveled into separate content areas. Galileo, astronomy, poetry, and the student in the center of it all, ideally writing for pleasure and discovery more than “demonstration of correct learning”–really, to be frank, learning to become a bit philosophical and alive to the miracle this all is, and show that coming-to-life in four years of writing towards it–that’s what we’re looking at.
The grammar, correctness, and assessment for more academic things we can still use traditional assessment for. Blogging is different.
This whole conversation started with a “Teacher Think-Aloud.” Our goal is for the learners to go through four sustained years of a very similar “wondering aloud”–and “wonder” is a wonderfully polyvalent word.
Am I making sense?
Actually, Chris Watson and three of his Hawaiian learners skyped with some of my own learners for about 3 hours this Sunday morning (in shifts), and we had this conversation. It’s like the young ones had never considered that the topics of the classroom could be worth wondering about. They seemed to see that, looked in a non-”schooly” way, they are very much so.
And this is the pilot class of ninth graders that will begin this 3.5 year blogging journey at our school.
Thanks so much, both, for your input.
I’ll edit and podcast the student voices as soon as I can.
C.
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No. 4 — March 11th, 2007 at 6:12 am
Hi Mr.Burell!
About the blogging, personally, i feel like blogging=homework. Since I have to think about my grammar, idea and stuff, it takes more than 15 minutes to write one blog. Actually it takes more than 30 minutes! But i like when you said only English blogging is going to be graded! When all the teachers started to assign blogging for each subject, i will hate this blogging stuff with my passion. Also, personally i want my blogs to kept private. (This is just my very very personal opinion!) Also you said ” The policy will begin with this year’s grade 9 class. They will continue blogging about their “educational journey” until they graduate in grade 12.” I think this is good idea but……. um….. anyway, when i think about blogging, for me it is little bit of pain, since i’m really bad at writing and pratically bad at everything that is related to writing.
I think i wrote so much nonsense sorry!!!
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No. 5 — November 9th, 2007 at 9:17 am
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