Throughout the year, students posted both formal and informal writing assignments on blogs and were asked to comment on each other's ideas in specific, non-evaluative ways. Students were asked to avoid both making quality statements (i.e., "your thesis is good") and to avoid offering advice for improvement (i.e., "you need to blend your quotes more smoothly"). Instead, they were encouraged to respond to ideas by talking about how they spark other ideas. For example, one assignment might ask a student to write a working thesis for a paper topic and to post a quotation that might be used in that paper. Then, the followup exercise would ask students to find new textual evidence that went along with another student's working thesis and to include it in a comment on the original post. These frequent, informal posts were graded on their degree of engagement, rather than on correctness, length, structure, or even creativity. That is, students were scored based on how seriously they seem to be taking each other, and how specifically they respond to what they were reading.
For example, after studying some poems and poetic techniques, students were asked to find their own poems and to write about something they learned from the poem. The next assignment was to read other students' poetry posts and to write a new post detailing something they'd learned from a classmate. On that final assignment, Diego A. wrote the following:
I was especially intrigued by what Parker had to say. As Parker described, by looking at the last two lines of the poem you can tell that the author didn't just say how much love there is; to the contrary, the author actually gave a great example of what love meant to him. I think this is great because sometimes I find myself saying plain things with no particular significance and that are sometimes clichéd. This poem is a great example of what I should be striving for in order to improve my writing.Here Diego shows both the ability to respond to Parker's idea and to internalize the subsequent synthesized idea. What's really telling about his response is the fact that he was able to take a very broadly defined assignment—"read several other students' posts on poetry and then write about something you learned"—and use collaborative language authentically. He wasn't asked to apply the poem to his own writing style or to discuss clichés, but after a whole school year of seeing and using those collaborative models, he was able to do respond creatively, authentically, and independently.
After a year of practice, all students were able to mobilize these skills much more efficiently and effectively than they could in September. Their first attempts at this kind of collaboration were typically much more stilted, much shorter, and much more focused on the kinds of corrective responses that students often think constitute "peer editing"—often despite explicit instructions not to do so. The early attempts at analysis were similarly undeveloped, and even with explicit instructions to mention a classmate's ideas, even engaged students struggled to do so in more than a cursory fashion. After a few weeks, though, collaboration and collaborative language both get internalized, and students start to interact more freely and productively. By May, the improvement was dramatic across the board.
With online publishing, both the student and the teacher have quick access to the entire year's work, so the student can be asked to go back and reflect on his improvement, and the teacher can go back and drill down into an individual student's progress at any time. Students can go back and tag work as part of a portfolio or reference it in self-reflective writing on their own progress and goals.
As always, students wrote, far, far more than I could ever read. They still submitted two or more formal papers per quarter that were graded, returned, and redrafted, but they also wrote multiple posts and comments on their blogs, typically on the same concepts that would later appear in formally graded papers. I graded a sporadic selection (think Skinnerian reinforcement schedules) for degree of engagement, but the amount of writing was predicated on Dixie Goswami's theory that if you have time to read everything your students are writing, your students aren't writing nearly enough. Everything a student writes is read by their teacher or their classmates, so the accountability is still there, and is in many ways more authentic than the accountability of a grade.
For students who lack skills or engagement, online collaboration is no panacea, but it does provide an opportunity to engage many struggling students. The kids that write cursory traditional work and skip assignments will start out writing cursory collaborative work, and they'll still skip assignments. However, when a student is missing work and comes into a class in which students are reading each other's work, the missing work is held doubly accountable. Not only with the teacher disapprove, but other classmates must now work around the gap in the class's material. The collaborative process is helping us catch more of our struggling students earlier on, and it's giving students who struggle with skills a low-risk environment to practice with ideas before being asked to develop their skills by deploying those ideas on a formal assignment.
Kristin and I also used the blogs for a cross-class collaboration. Her students read Salinger's Catcher in the Rye as mine read his Nine Stories. When my students started Catcher, they read some material from Kristin's class, as her class read some of my class's material on Nine Stories. So as my students were beginning to form impressions about Holden Caulfield and the themes of Catcher, they were able to turn to a wealth of authentic material. Later, Kristin's class posted direct responses to my students' writing on Catcher as my students posted on her students' writing on Nine Stories.
For example, my student Andy F., in response to the question "What are the conflicts between what Holden values and what he thinks the world values?" wrote, "I'd have to say it would be trying to impress or accomodate everyone. Holden seems to mention this a lot by refering to it as 'phony' or 'corny.'" Kristin's student, Daniel G., wrote a response that included the statement "Holden doesn't see this phoniness in children, and he wants to keep them sincere." In a subsequent essay on success, Andy explores a related idea: "that we are just too blinded by what we think we are expected to do by others, is when we end up trying to follow the wrong set of guidelines, hoping to reach success."
This interaction is just a teeny example of something that happened at least four other times in Andy's work on Catcher and dozens of times across that class. Students generated their own ideas, identified relevant ideas in other students' work, and progressed to deeper, more evidence-based understanding of each text.
We also noticed that by combining classes and thus adding a less-known group to each student's audience, we refreshed the students' sense of complacency and safety. They stepped up their game a bit when they had a less familiar group as an audience. After working as a class for much of the year, they can develop a complacency about doing less than their best. Increasing the audience gave them a nice shot in the arm.
When students consistently publish both process material and polished, formal material, they write with greater authenticity. The assignment becomes less of a game of pleasing the teacher and more of an exercise in finding something interesting to say, especially when they know that their work won't just be read but will also be used to generate responses. The intense focus on process also removes some of the motivation to short circuit the writing process by looking for the "answers" online. Students can go to each other for insights and simply cite the post they used as a springboard for their own ideas. Struggling students can look at the work of successful classmates for models, and even the strongest students also benefit from the exchange.
I've used this method for two years now, and I'm not going back. Kristin and I have been able to create a small academic community of literary thinkers and writers who spend the year in dialogue about the ideas they read about and the ideas they generate. Kids are getting more practice and more opportunities to write authentically, and they end up with more legitimate, interesting papers. The software itself is irrelevant. We use Blogger right now, but we're not really "blogging" per se. We could use any software that allowed us to publish, share, and organize with a minimum of logistical fuss.
