There is a special kind of excitement that tingles when you are about to embark in a new adventure. As a teacher, I want to be excited about my practice, so my students are excited about their learning. So when at a recent staff development session, From Consumers to Producers, we were challenged to put in practice a lesson that will allow students to be creative and at the same time dig deeper in the TEKS; I felt compelled to try something new. Let students blog about their reading. I know, scary.
I always want students to enjoy reading beyond questions, quizzes, just for the love of reading. Plus, after STAAR Writing, I wanted students to write with a purpose and audience in mind. I saw here a chance to tackle two birds with one stone. I decided to start with the Literature Circles protocol and tweak it. During this planning process it was great to bounce ideas with some other participants of From Consumers to Producers, and my Tech Facilitator.
The first step was to let students choose their books. I admit, my first impulse was to group them by ability period, but Jessica nudge me to let them choose and set parameters to modify the grouping. A Google Form did the trick, student's chose 3 books in order of interest, this gave me enough room to make the Book Clubs.
The second step was to introduce the jobs, and let the students decide reading weekly goals and a system to rotate jobs. In this iteration of Literary Circle Roles, I just focused in a Discussion Director, a Summary Master, a Character Investigator and a Quote Master. Students were to read and then we'll host a book club meeting once a week to discuss our findings. These conversations would be the support for their blogs.
Then came the fun part, Jessica Stubs came to our classroom to guide us to create a website. Yes, each one of my students made their own blog! I provided a template with some examples for them to follow. And voila! We became bloggers! My sample posts served as models to grade our posts with a rubric. This detail is important because I want this experience to be self-monitored and peer monitored. So when students write, they need to self-check in their rubrics before peer edit or conference with me.
Once the websites were done, it was time to write our first post. All students have read their chapters, however some struggled to go beyond simply restating the book. Peer conference helped, and I met with them to give feedback before they published. Everyone was excited, and of course they wanted to share it. This stage was a little scary to me, I wasn't sure how my students will be able to handle feedback. Students shared their links in a Padlet, they were to read another classmate blog and leave a positive but specific comment. So far the experience/experiment is going well. Students are excited to read and write, and yes, the quality of the posts is a upward journey, but I am surprised by how much they want to do it. It is taking longer to post, due to time, and because I want to conference with each one before they put it out there. (I know... I have control issues) But I think that as they become more familiar with the process, we will be able to run this smoothly. Wish us good luck!
