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Connection. My Grade 8 English class has spent the last several weeks unpacking this concept. It’s the Key Concept of our current MYP English unit titled, “The Youth Connection.” The students have spent much of the unit exploring different types of connections, as well as actually making connections (text-to-text, text-to-world and text-to-self). The vehicle through which we’ve been making many of these connections is Edublogs.
At the outset of “The Youth Connection” unit, the students were asked to select one of four novels to study. Each of the four novels focused on youth experience, albeit in different times, places and spaces. For example, “Between Shades of Gray” by Ruta Sepetys recounts the story of a 15-year-old Lithuania girl living during the WWII era, while Deborah Ellis’s “The Heaven Shop” tells the story of a 13-year-old AIDs orphan living in Malawi in the modern day. After selecting a novel, the students were put into small groups with others who chose the same novel, and were tasked with building a blog about their book.
Among several other required blog posts, each group was responsible for developing a post that described real-world connections and personal connections to the novel. The blog proved to be an effective medium for this assignment, allowing students to embed links, videos, and even some personal photos, to comprehensively explain the connections. I was extremely pleased to see my students not only make a number of strong connections to their novels, but also make excellent use of the various features of the blog to reinforce these connections.
Upon completing their novels and blogs, the students were then asked to visit their classmates’ blogs, and make connections to the other three texts via comments on others’ posts. Here too, there were a number of excellent connections being made, such as:
“In my opinion, there are some striking similarities between Lina’s experiences in Between Shades of Gray and Binti’s experiences in The Heaven Shop. They are both living happy, comfortable lives in the beginning. Then, with no warning, their worlds come crashing down. Both girls face extreme adversity, but in the end they become stronger because of it. Through their struggles, it is shown how much both of them love their families. As we know, both of them lose their parents. Also, when Binti gets to her grandmother’s house, she is one of the oldest so she feels a responsibility to take care of the younger ones. Lina probably felt that same responsibility when her parents died because she had become the oldest in her family. Even though these books are taking place in completely different places and time periods, they are both great examples of the impacts that these horrible tragedies… can have on young adults.”
Once again, the blogs turned out to be a highly effective tool for this task. They facilitated the sharing and analyzing of other students’ work, and ultimately, helped students to learn about and make connections to other texts that they had not previously read.
With all of this in mind, it seems as though the answer to the question I posed at the beginning – “To blog, or not to blog?” – is rather straightforward: a resounding “to blog!”
I’m not so sure.
It seems that in all my effort to inspire and cultivate connections, I may have sacrificed another important type of connection: human connectedness.
I found that the interactions between my Grade 8 English students in class were actually rather disconnected during this unit. They spent many of the class periods I had set aside for them to work on this project with their headphones on, staring at their computer screens, typing away on their blogs. It left me wondering: Did I encourage the making of literary connections via the use of technology at the expense of students connecting and collaborating with each other in class?
The debate around technology as a “connector” or an “isolator” is certainly not new; and like all nuances of life, it has the potential to be both. Technology isolated my students in that it discouraged collaboration. Then again, it promoted connectedness, helping students to recognize the similarities amongst youth across time, space and place – a masterclass in empathy.
Perhaps the issue of disconnectedness in this English unit could be solved on my end by a change in the assignment criteria and expectations. This is the first year we’ve run this unit, and there are certainly some adjustments that could be made. As we well know, a crucial part of the 21st century teacher’s role is learning how to leverage educational technology such that it enriches student learning, while reinforcing (rather than sacrificing) the best practices that already exist.
Perhaps I should do away with the blog component altogether and go back to the more traditional literature circle format, which encourages a great deal of discussion amongst students.
Or, is the implementation of this idea incomplete; is a blog-based unit the perfect setting for the flipped classroom? What might be the impact of having my students blog at home and discuss in class?
And so, paraphrasing our noble Prince Hamlet, I ask you Cohort 21, “to blog, or not to blog?”
A thoughtful reflection on your effort to make learning not only accessible to your students but also relevant to their way of communicating. All jokes aside about kids texting each other when sitting in the back seat of the car TOGETHER, your penultimate question includes the answer. You created a perfect situation for creating interest in a subject; a medium that many students will gladly embrace for “homework” at night. In other words, yes, why would you assign a blog during class time? My hunch is that your own blog is not written during your teaching time, so why would you do the same to students? Teachers meet and discuss during staff meetings and PD days, and then reflect later on in a blog; IB teachers who take training sessions meet teachers from all over the world and discuss, but their blogs are done on their own after they’ve reflected on the live discussion. I have a feeling that your suggestion to do away with the blog component is a bit of red-herring; nothing in your assignment suggests that you want to return solely to a traditional literature circle format after exposing your students to twenty-first century learning. But surely there’s a difference between “traditional” as “staid” and “traditional” as “best practices”. As an IB teacher, surely you can appreciate the difference between online workshops and attending a weekend session; have you ever heard anyone state that they prefer the online workshops? I doubt it; I think it’s just the realization that this is a viable alternative and an exigency of getting as many people to participate as is logistically possible. You have the luxury of being able to offer both over the course of the unit. You will have found some students who have shone during discussion but others who have shown insight by being able to reflect and work at their own pace on a blog. Why not do both and assess both?
Douglas,
Thanks for your comment.
I think you’re absolutely right. It makes perfect sense to have the students reflect and blog at home, after discussing with their peers in class. And I agree that they are much more likely to “embrace” this kind of homework. You’re also correct in saying that the question I posed about returning to the “traditional” literature circle was a bit of a red herring; I think there’s a great deal of value in using the blogs for this assignment (not to mention the students enjoyed them), and I wish to continue using them. The solution most certainly lies in adjusting the structure and expectations of the assignment, such that they students have an opportunity to collaborate in class, and reflect at home.
Thanks again for sharing your thoughts!
Hi Allison,
As a middle school language arts teacher, I really enjoyed reading your post. This past year I’ve really been focused on helping students facilitate better discussions, and therefore learning, through the use of effective questioning, and the focus has very much been face-2-face. They are getting much better at promoting critical thinking and making connections, never mind become better facilitators (an unexpected, but added bonus).
I really like the framework for your blog, and I think that Douglas’s comments are very true. Why not do both? I have never assessed traditional Lit Circles as ‘of’ learning pieces, and I’d be reluctant to do so. However, I think the learning that comes from them could very effectively be assessed from their blog.
Thanks for the idea!
Meg