What question guided your inquiry and action plan? (HMW?)
My final “How Might We…” question was, “How Might We Integrate leverage student’s writing opportunities to help create inclusive and accessible classroom newsletters?”
What did you do and what impact did it have?
One issue that I noticed in my class during the year was that I used to send out a Friday email that served as a classroom update or an e-newsletter. I would include important classroom information as well as updates concerning school or division wide events. This information was fairly important and it ranged from what uniform to wear each day to clubs and athletics schedules for the upcoming week. I also liked to include curriculum updates and homework reminders. However, one piece of feedback I received was that the emails wouldn’t be universally checked and if they were, they seemed to be skimmed and the information fell to the wayside. This had lead to a general sense of confusion, last minute emailing, and a sense of disorganization and miscommunication. I used empathy and perspective and put myself in the shoes of parents and students. Students wouldn’t be motivated to review the emails because they didn’t receive them and there was no real incentive to remind their parents to review them. Parents live busy lives and I thought the email either fell through the cracks of their inbox or was partially read without any lasting impact. So, I started thinking about ways that I could share this information with parents and students in a way that was more accessible and that created a bit of incentive for engagement.
During literacy, we completed a unit on article writing. The culminating task was for students to write articles about our school by conducting interviews with key members of the school. I knew students had the knowledge and ability to write articles and when I proposed the idea of possibly creating a school newspaper, my students were very excited. I knew I could leverage this passion and use it as a motivator for my Cohort 21 project. Using the “Student Led Project” period (so we didn’t have to derail our progress through the literacy curriculum) I created a series of steps for students to follow to create their own articles or podcasts that would then be used as content in a class newsletter. The students all had a hand in naming and branding our newsletter and they worked to create their articles. We created a publishing schedule where two students had to contribute each week. I used Google Slides as my layout software and all I had to do was import my students’ articles and lay it out. I then added the weekly information and some other fun things like jokes, memes, word puzzles, and more.
What did you learn in the process ? (Link to any resources)
Here are some resources I created that helped me realize this project:
This was the slideshow we used to create our newsletter branding
This was the shared Google Doc we used to generate article ideas
This is our publication schedule so students know when they contributions are due
The impact that it had was significant. I am getting the general sense that students are much more aware of the events and schedule of the week at hand. They know what to bring to school, what to wear to school, when events are happening, and there’s a better execution of executive functioning. I just finished Parent Teacher Conferences and the feedback I received from parents whose kids had published was that they brought the newsletter home and were extremely proud of their work and the parents whose kids hadn’t published yet had brought home the newsletter and explained how excited they were to eventually publish.
Here are two examples of our classroom newsletters:
What is your big take-away and what questions do you still have?
My big takeaway is that providing parents with a physical newsletter pays very big dividends which can be seen in student executive functioning. Also, we don’t have to take on the entire burden of responsibility to create content for a newsletter. When we open up the writing process and we invite students to contribute, their passion and motivation come through. We also see the added bonus of providing students an opportunity to take a risk and try something they’ve probably never done before. This is a safe risk with huge upside as teachers can help students along the writing and publishing process. This ultimately saved time for myself (as I didn’t have to write the entire newsletter on my own) and it was an amazing learning opportunity for the students. I wonder next if I can also teach students to layout the work in Google Slides to create the finished product for themselves? I also wonder how I can incorporate other forms of media such as podcasting or video?