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By Shelley Wright

As an English teacher, I’ve had numerous conversations with college professors who lament the writing skills of their first year students. But not all writing. Most students are capable of solid expository writing. It’s their skill with persuasive writing that’s the problem. Specifically, they’re weak at writing a thesis statement that can be argued.

I spend three years teaching my high school students how to write a persuasive essay. For many students, it takes that long. (And I’m lucky to have them that long in my school.)

Part of the problem is that our current school systems — and not just in Canada — aren’t great at producing independent thinkers. Without this ability, it’s hard to create a great thesis statement, anticipate the arguments against it, and then compose your own argument in light of what you understand about the pros and cons of an issue.

So for three years, I write for them, and with them. We talk about opening paragraphs, and they learn how to write them with their thesis statement either as the first or last sentence. (The latter requires more skill.) They learn to use transition words, embed quotations to support their argument, consider the advantages of active vs. passive voice, vary their sentences, and many other skills, all in the hope of creating a strong argument.

The truth is lately I’ve come to question the point of much of this. Does the average person, once they leave school, spend a lot of time composing academic essays? Is this the best way for our students to show their learning?  In some places, the academic 5 paragraph essay is hailed as the Holy Grail of non-fiction writing achievement. Yet even if a student can become a great persuasive essay writer, they’re still only semi-literate, at least according to the definition of 21st Century Literacies.

A DIFFERENT BEAST

While traditional essay writing may not help alleviate this situation, I think blogging can. Here’s the problem; Blogging is an entirely different beast. And one of the things I’ve learned about my students is that they don’t necessarily transfer a skill they’ve learned in one area to another without difficulty, or even prompting.

For one, the paragraphing is different. The large, solid paragraphs of prose that can be found in a typical persuasive essay, can feel arduous and cumbersome to all but the most determined reader.

Instead, blog paragraphs tend to be shorter. It allows the piece to feel fluid and speeds up the rate at which your reader reads (often through the glare of a computer monitor or on a phone or tablet screen). And while the effective blogger still uses transition words, as many aren’t necessary to provide the piece with a feeling of fluidity and coherence.

Sometimes a paragraph is one simple sentence, used for emphasis.

Another thing is the thesis statement. Its placement, in a blog, is up for grabs. Did you catch where mine is? Actually, I haven’t written it yet. Huh?!

Blogging also requires a different voice. The way I blog isn’t quite how I talk, but it’s nowhere close to how I write a formal essay. Furthermore, the voice used in blogging needs to be rich, sharp and distinct, to gain an audience. And while some may argue that academic writing could stand to have a bit more color and flair, I’m not sure that’s currently the accepted norm (although I wish it was).

In a formal essay, I would never use a sentence fragment. Ever. In a blog, it provides emphasis. Nor would I use slang in an essay.  But here? Yep. In one of my posts, I double-dog dared my readers.  Could you imagine double-dog daring anyone in an academic essay? If you try it, let me know the result.

Another thing that changes is providing your reader with evidence to support your points. In teaching the typical formal essay, I show my students how to quote directly, indirectly, and using individual words. Blogs still use direct quotes, but an indirect quote can be as simple as a vague mention and a link.

MY THESIS STATEMENT

I think blogging is the new persuasive essay – my thesis, finally.

Truth is, I love writing essays. There’s something satisfying about rendering the chaos of thoughts into an elegant form. But I love blogging more. It feels like playing.

I also find it more useful. While our students will need to know how to write essays to get through university, many won’t use it after that, unless they remain in academia. I think writing and persuasive thinking skills are important. However, I question the current products we require of students as proof of their learning. Most of the essays written by our students likely end up in the garbage or the computer trash can. And most are for an audience of one.

Blogging has the potential to reach and influence many. Furthermore, it has greater potential for being a life-long skill. And isn’t that our goal in education? People from all walks and professions blog for the purpose of teaching, creating, and informing. A number of my recent Masters courses didn’t require papers; instead, they required blogging. Why?

Because blogging is the new persuasive essay.

If we’re trying to prepare our students to think critically and argue well, they need to be able to blog. It allows for interaction. It allows for ideas to be tested. And the best posts anywhere in cyberspace tend to have a point that can be argued.

I think blogging across the curriculum, not just in Language Arts, allows for both formative and summative assessment. Blogs allow us to see the progression in the development of both thinking and writing. It may actually take more talent and skill to create an interesting persuasive post (or series of posts) on the French Revolution than a traditional essay.

BLOGGING AS A SKILL

Students definitely need to understand how and why the mechanics (and style) of blogging are different.

The solution? Blogging needs to start earlier, much earlier. I read recently of a kindergarten teacher who blogs with her students. Great idea. There’s a teacher in my division who does amazing things with her grade one class.

I’m not proposing that you need to do things radically different. Teach whatever you teach for Language Arts, or other subjects, but include a blog component. So if you’re teaching sentence structure, teach your students to create complete sentences while blogging. Blogs, like traditional writing, need great structure. If you’re focusing on capitalization or punctuation, transfer this skill to blog writing as well.

If you’re teaching paragraph structure, teach students the paragraph structure required for traditional essays and that for blogs. They’re different. Explain why. It’s likely they won’t be good at it at first. But there is merit to the quote, “Anything worth doing, is worth doing badly.”

A middle years teacher at my school used to stress out when we talked about student writing. She wanted to know if she was teaching them enough. My reply: “All  I need them to do is write solid paragraphs. If they can do that, I can teach them all kinds of things.” Really, everything I teach is either an addition to, or a subtraction from, a solid paragraph. My work builds on her work. I don’t need her to teach what I teach.  That’s my job.  But without her previous work, mine becomes much more difficult.

The same is true with blogging. Starting from scratch with blogging in grade 10 isn’t impossible. But we could do so much more if they already had the basics. In order to write well, you need to write a lot.

If you don’t currently teach your students to blog, please start. Our students need you to. And if you already teach your students to blog, keep it up. Because blogging is an important 21st century skill. It’s the new persuasive essay.

Shelley Wright is a teacher/education blogger living in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan in Canada. She teaches high school English, science and technology. Her passion in education is social justice, global education and helping her students make the world a better place. She blogs at Wright’s Room. Follow her on Twitter at @wrightsroom.

This post originally appeared on Voices from the Learning Revolution.

Flickr: Duchamp

By Shelley Wright

Teachers who are interested in shifting their classrooms often don’t know where to start. It can be overwhelming, frightening, and even discouraging, especially when no one else around you seems to think the system is broken.

The question I’ve been asked often throughout the past year is “Where should a teacher begin?”  I’ve reflected on  this a fair amount, and I think small strategic steps are the key.

1. START WITH ONE UNIT

Start with creating one inquiry unit in one subject. You can jump in and change everything at once like I did, but that’s slightly crazy. Instead, if you design one unit in one subject, at the end of each day, or week, you can analyze what worked and what didn’t. While teaching doesn’t always leave a lot of time for luxuries like reflection, it really is the key to figuring out inquiry learning, and as the teacher, it’s one of your most important roles.

Sometimes you may not understand why certain things aren’t working. Ask your students. I’m often surprised by how much they know and how adept they are at articulating what they need.

Two of the best resources I’ve found for creating an inquiry classroom are Carol Kuhlthau’s work and Alberta Learning’s Guide to Inquiry Learning.

If you don’t know how to create an inquiry classroom, ask me. I’m happy to help. You can begin by posting comments here. If you need resources, I can probably point you to some. Over the past year, I’ve had the opportunity to email, Skype and, if distance allows, have teachers, administrators and superintendents visit my classroom to see what we do.

2. TALK ABOUT LEARNING

Talk to your students about their learning — a lot.  Especially in the beginning, I talk to my students about why my classroom is structured differently than every other class in our school. I show them Ken Robinson’s talk about how the 20th century school system doesn’t really prepare students anymore.  I also show them Chris Lehmann’s TED-X talk emphasizing how education is broken and Karl Fisch’s Did You Know?.

I tell my students that essentially I’m preparing them for jobs that don’t currently exist, that will use technology which hasn’t been invented yet, to fix problems we’re not currently aware of. They get the point. It’s about developing skills and habits of learning, and we use content to do that.

But I also talk to my student’s about stuff like how their brain works, and how neural connections need to be made. That often, in order for students to learn something new, it needs to be attached to things they already know. Just before the recent break, during the last week of school, we talked about cognitive dissonance and Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development. They like to know there’s a reason for the way they feel when they don’t “get it.” And they like to know that everyone’s zone of development is different. In fact, they were amazed to find out everyone’s brain is different.

And, yes, I use the big words. I simply explain what they mean. I don’t use them to sound smart. I use them because it makes my students feel smart; most of our society doesn’t treat our students like they’re capable of understanding or doing much. I do.

3. MAKE TECH WORK FOR YOU

Embed technology in ways that are authentic to the learning process. The first tools that I teach my students are Google Docs, Diigo or Delicious to bookmark their research, and Symbaloo to house their tools.

Experience has taught me that the first day I introduce a class to Google Docs, we will get nothing done. To them, it’s the most amazing thing ever. They usually spend most of the class typing back and forth to each other in the doc. No big deal. However, eventually, my students open Google Docs without me telling them to. I have students who literally use them for every lab, essay, and assignment. And the ability for a group to work on and edit the same document at the same time, more than makes up for the initial class we lose.

The social media tools we used to show our learning in our slavery unit seemed like the most natural and logical tools to use. As a learning community, we want our learning to extend beyond the four walls of our classroom. So we have a discussion, or likely multiple discussions, about what that should look like. We also want our projects to have “real world” implications. What’s more real world than advocacy against modern-day slavery using social media?

Essentially these are the two criteria we use to assess the product we’re going to create. How do we extend our learning beyond our classroom — and how can what we do here make a difference to the real world?  Our tool selection is guided by the answers to these questions.

4. EXPECT TO HIT THE WALL

Remember that inquiry learning is an emotional process. Each stage of learning has specific emotions attached to it, and at some point, you and your students will likely hit the wall. That’s normal.

I’ve found that we need to talk more as an inquiry class. My role is to be well aware of how my students are doing emotionally, especially when we’re dealing with a weighty, overwhelming topic like slavery. While this may not matter much in a traditional classroom, it can completely blow apart a community learning through inquiry.

I won’t promise you that any of this will be easy. It’s not. You’ll likely have days when you wonder why you ever started it. But trust me, it’s worth it.

Shelley Wright is a teacher/education blogger living in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan in Canada. She teaches high school English, science and technology. This post originally appeared on Voices of the Learning Revolution.

Flickr: Mike Baird

By Shelley Wright

I love the flip. I do. And I realize by saying this I’m making a controversial statement. I believe if used judiciously, in the right context, the flip can free up valuable class time and provide the background knowledge that is fundamental for students to then go forward and wrestle with higher order thinking.

The flip that I’m talking about is the flipped classroom or reverse instruction.  It’s called the flip because, essentially, it reverses traditional teaching. Instead of lectures occurring in the classroom and assignments being done at home, the opposite occurs. Lectures are viewed at home by students, via videos or podcasts, and class time is devoted to assignments or projects based on this knowledge. It’s different from traditional homework because students know that we won’t spend the next class period going over the content they’ve engaged with at home. Instead, we’ll use it as a springboard into deeper discussion and activities. Brilliant.

As much as I like the flip, I don’t believe that it’s the savior of education (or the epitome of evil) as some would suggest. The point of the flip is to capture more of the time when teacher and students are together for deeper learning — to create more opportunities to apply knowledge and skills to challenging in-class assignments. Bottom line: it’s not always the right instructional choice, it’s only one tool in our educational repertoire. But it can be a powerful one.

Some believe that the flip is somehow designed to replace teachers.  I think that’s only possible if you think the most important, or sole, job that I perform in my classroom is content dispenser. I don’t believe that at all.

As a teacher, my job is to facilitate my students’ acquisition of skills and understanding.  I do that using different kinds of content. I also challenge them, encourage them, believe in them,  love them, and offer correction when necessary.  The most important thing I do in my classroom is show students how to dig deep, solve problems, and reflect carefully on the constant stream of information that inundates us all. At the same time, I’m modelling important learning skills that they’ll need for the rest of their lives.

I think the flip is only as good as the teacher who performs it. I suppose it’s possible to abuse the flip, and use it to abdicate your responsibility as a teacher by assigning videos or podcasts every night. But my guess is that the same teachers who would do this are already showing an endless stream of videos to their classes anyway. That’s a teacher problem, not a problem with the strategy itself. A great teacher knows how to use videos to augment student knowledge or rouse curiosity.

How Can We Flip Successfully?

I think in bite-sized chunks.

For me, inquiry learning is where it’s at. I don’t believe in assigning videos  every night as a substitute for my own lecturing. To me, that’s simply the traditional classroom rearranged, not flipped.  I use the flip when my students need to absorb a few chunks of new information to continue learning. I don’t use it to front-load information at the beginning of a unit. I think that can rob students of the experience of authentically building knowledge and skills as they encounter new concepts.

My science classes are one place where I can, at times, introduce chunks of new information for home study and then use interactive labs and activities in class so that my students have to wrestle deeply with concepts they’ve just been introduced to. But not always. While I wish I taught in a world that allows my students to discover everything by inquiry, I don’t. I teach chemistry and biology; both are classes that are content dense. Until that changes, there are times I need to teach concepts through direct instruction.

That said, many times the flip can help me keep up the pace in science classes by allowing students who are struggling with new material to watch and re-watch the parts of the concept outside of class. I’ve had students who are ecstatic because they can learn at their own pace at home. During class time I’m able to interact with every student, and target those who are really struggling with extra time, which is not something that happened when I taught in a more traditional way.

How Do I Use the Flip?

I use flip time to create curiosity in my students. This video is an example. When I assign it, I ask, “With the knowledge that you have, try to explain why you think this happened?”

You can see from the video why I don’t hand out dollops of Cesium to my students!  I find, especially in Chemistry, that my students come to the subject lacking much of the background knowledge essential to advance their learning. They’re also often limited in their ability to create models and “talk” science.

Part of the way I help them learn requires me to determine their ability to construct a conceptual framework from their observations. After they’ve watched this video, and tried to create a plausible reason for why it occurred, we’ll begin class the next day by discussing the theories they’ve come up with. (This gives me a lot of information about where each student is on the concept-creation continuum.) From their theories, we’ll create models, through collaboration, that we can test.

I’ve also used the flip after we’ve spent class time learning through inquiry. I might assign a video that pulls together all that we’ve learned. Does every student need to watch it? Not necessarily.  Students who thoroughly understand a concept can decide that for themselves. But those who are still struggling with the ideas, after we’ve examined them for an hour,  can watch the video, take notes, and see if they can pull it all together. In the past I might have referred struggling students to a summary in the textbook for review at home. On their own time, they’re much more likely to watch and benefit from a good visual demonstration.

My students also enjoy watching TED videos, so at times they’re assigned a TED talk, often of a leading scientist or thinker, to expand their appreciation for how science or other knowledge is applied. Using the flip, I can target these to particular student interests and expose them to learning opportunities that I’d never have time to offer during our daily jam-packed class periods.

None of this is passive learning. My students are required to interact with the knowledge that is being presented to them. The videos are posted on our wiki, which now serves as our digital textbook. Our wiki is custom-designed to support what we’re learning. Students can then respond with either a blog post sharing their thoughts, or through interaction with their peers in a wiki discussion tab.

Flipping school

While some are sounding the alarm, I think the flip makes good sense. It helps teachers make the most of class time to deeply engage our students in community. As Jonathon Martin states, “We know that collaboration is a critical skill set which can’t be developed easily either on-line or at home alone – let’s have students learn it with us in our classrooms. Let every classroom be a collaborative problem solving laboratory or studio.”

So this fall, instead of your students returning to a traditional setting, flip your classroom. Create a collaborative problem solving studio for them to learn in. It will be a year they’ll never forget.

Photos: (surfing) Mike Baird (otter) Ben Spark. Creative Commons.

Shelley Wright is a teacher/education blogger living in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan in Canada. She teaches high school English, science and technology. Her passion in education is social justice, global education and helping her students make the world a better place. She blogs at Wright’s Room. Follow her on Twitter at @wrightsroom. Meet the rest of our Voices.

Wright’s article first appeared in the Voices from the Learning Revolution blog at Powerful Learning Practice.

Shelley Wright

Shelley Wright's class constructed a complete Holocaust Museum as part of a school project.

This past school year, Shelley Wright, a high school educator in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, made a number of big changes in her teaching practice. The class went paperless and used a Wiki, she incorporated project-based learning and collaboration into her lessons, she experimented with “vessays.” All along the way, she documented everything on her blog Wright’s Room — not just operational information, but how those changes affected her view of learning and her relationship with her students.

It took a lot of courage on Wright’s part to just jump in with these new practices. Since her blog already reflects her own opinions about the changes, I wondered what her students and the students’ parents felt about them. I asked Wright to send out a query, and here’s what we learned.

First, here are some responses from students about the class’s built-from-the-ground-up Holocaust Exhibit, the epitome of project-based learning.

• “It was a great experience for me to learn different kinds of work. For example, painting, sewing, sound system, and working with different peers each day. I think that I could learn as much from a textbook but it for sure wouldn’t be a fun and enjoyable way of learning. Before this, I thought that learning and school was that you sat in a desk for the day and wrote paperwork and math equations and different types of exams. I see now that school subjects can be taught in a more unique, fun, and enjoyable way for the students. It will help the students think positive about school and they will want to come and learn.”

• 

  Shelley Wright

  Students work on the Holocaust exhibit.

  “We were given the opportunity to go into any aspect of the holocaust. We weren’t told to study certain things and had limits on what we wanted to learn. People just went into what interested them most. I wouldn’t have been able to learn as much as I did if we were only using textbooks. Sure, they put the important ‘stuff’ in there everybody needs to know, but with the Internet, anybody can put things on it. So you can research anything and somebody will have something about it. Like, who would have thought that not only the Jews had stars. I definitely see learning differently after that project, because during the entire project I was kinda my own teacher. I wanted to know about something, I researched it and I was able to teach others what I learned and vice-versa. Usually I learn things only for the test and then after that, it’s out of my mind two days later. But for this, what I learned doesn’t get out of my head, because it’s all things that interested me and I actually wanted to learn.”

• “Suddenly the information wasn’t just information – they were real stories – this project has made a lasting impression for me. Before [this project], learning consisted of novel studies — reading a book and answering comprehensive questions. During this project we read novel(s), then got into groups and researched what we were interested in learning more about (compiling our information onto a shared Google Doc) and finally as a class we came up with a way to present everything we’d learned. It was a great experience and opportunity.”
• “Not only did I get to show my work, but people got to see the talents I have. I think it’s easier to pay attention to people than a book. Also, I couldn’t rely on the teacher anymore, I had to rely on myself and my classmates; which is a lot harder than you think.”

And some thoughts about Wright’s paperless, collaborative Wiki system:

• “Not only do I get to see my opinion, but I get to see others as well. I usually have a hard time answering questions, so seeing opinions from other people can be very helpful.”

• “I like how you can go and see what your peers have written and collaborate from that and make it better. I also like how we’re not sitting in a classroom writing on a piece of paper but actually having class discussions about the questions and answers in class. I wish that I could change how some of the students didn’t choose to go and write answers on the wiki and left it for the students who were answering every time.”

• “It improved our team working skills and it was just really cool to work with! I loved that everybody could put their own thoughts into one thing and others could read what the others were thinking. Because some people think differently than others and view situations differently. What I didn’t like about it was that around the middle, people stopped posting and left it up to other people.”
• “The thing that I liked about it most was that I could access my work pretty much 24/7. We all know that teachers have a life outside of school but that doesn’t mean that they don’t work on school-related things. With the online wiki, if Mrs. Wright posted something new over the weekend I could start working on it asap, regardless if it was during school hours which I really liked. I wish that every class could have a wiki.”

A couple of parents also weighed in about how Wright’s changes seemed to affect their kids. A few quotes below:

• “[My daughter] has really enjoyed working in this way and is excited about her projects. I think it makes her feel her high school assignments are more on par with post secondary work than middle to elementary school projects, using these techniques. It also gives her a feeling of maturity and preparation for the last years of high school and gives her a look through the window at the work skills required in any post secondary studies she may pursue.”
• “I think the most powerful thing [my daughter] experienced was the Holocaust museum, and the great deal of work it took to create it. Every night at dinner we’d have an updated progress report, sometimes successes, sometimes frustrations. We noticed that she would put in many long hours researching and creating her parts of the museum. She was also very excited about presenting her work to the public.”

These comments prove to me that the hard work and perseverance Wright poured into her class have been incredibly fruitful. She’s made herself vulnerable, taken risks, and trusted her students — a true sign of a fearless teacher.