out some basic ideas and helped me assess overall comprehension, it was not conversation, not really. It quickly became clear that many students just went through the motions. When we use a discussion board without generating true engagement, we are far away from the epistolary tradition of in-depth written conversations in which people truly and deeply exchange ideas. We are far away from the depth of attention we pay in Socratic Seminar discussions. But here is lesson one I learned about technology from my newspaper staff this year: for today’s digital natives, students who perceive themselves as a community will start to find ways to use social media and online writing platforms to gather information and ideas and to respond to them in an authentic way. My newspaper students own their communal online identity. It keeps them all honest and productive. It makes them a team. They read each other’s stories. They compete, too, to notice which stories earn the most “likes” or get the most pageviews.Their work may end up scattered over all sorts of media, but it is all part of one enterprise. However, they would never give up the print edition of the paper. They adore watching the rest of the school read the paper, knowing that their stories at that moment are being shared by hundreds of students and teachers. They tell me that they hope the educational pieces we publish will really reach the readers who need them most. Being part of a learning community is powerful. A focus on community is the answer I chose for reinvigorating my literature classes as well. I recently dropped my very formal final assessment for my unit on Dante’s Inferno and switched to a free form written response to the question: “what can reading The Divine Comedy teach us about how to live a good life?” The class responding to the question is full of reluctant writers, but they responded enthusiastically to the prompt. It asks them to write about what they really think in response to the text. I allowed them to choose a writing platform for presenting their argument. I allowed them to oppose the prompt (writing, for example, about finding Dante’s ideas invalid). They began to have conversations about the text rather than how to fill out an outline handout. Students had to consider whether or not to personalize the format of their writing or stick with a familiar essay form. They asked each other for advice. The students who studied the canto on suicide realized that today it might speak to issues of eating disorders or cutting. They saw that Dante’s view of suicide as a sin has been overturned but that we still struggle ethically with how to view people harming or modifying their bodies. They tried out ideas together. They were showing signs of becoming an inquiry team. Everyone in the class was doing something different in his/her own writing, but they were a team united around one, open-ended but very answerable question. They are not going online with this assignment, but I see the transfer of the principle here and it validates how important it is for teenagers to interact around true inquiry. 20
Statement Vol. 49, Number 2
A second lesson I have learned from my newspaper class is that reporting the news and sharing opinions is exciting. Getting a scoop on other reporters is big excitement. Developing an explanation and the sources to support is satisfying. So why not try to bring that feeling back to 10th grade Language Arts? Why not incorporate that excitement into how we use instructional technology? For our next unit, we will be exploring Macbeth. I plan to try Edmodo again. But this time, I will make plans for my students to own it. If I use the discussion board, I will ask the class to post questions and respond to posts. Furthermore, I am going to introduce it as a news board, sort of a Scottish-noblesfocused Reddit. I will ask the class to debate, encourage, and add additional information and understandings. They will be able to use their phones to stage Instagrams, videos, etc. to post as news updates on the text. As students prepare to write more formally about the play, I’ll have them post ideas for evidence, connections, visuals, observations, etc. so everyone can discuss those posts together during an in-class discussion. But most essentially, all of the work that happens online will be connected to interactive explorations that happen during class time, as we work as a team to understand how a good person can go down an evil path. I always tell my newspaper class that my job as an adviser is to teach them enough to make me obsolete. But I don’t mean that literally. I think when we let go of teachers as an important part of guiding the learning process, we let go of the person who fosters relationship-building, the person who plants seeds for creating community around learning. And when we do that we leave students less able to transfer their knowledge to social and work situations. No faceless online course can replace that cultivation of community. Making myself obsolete means providing the support so that students can feel safe making their own meanings, publishing their own ideas, finding evidence through their own research. It means I guide them without getting in the way of their own authentic inquiries. Obsolete means I have created a team that carries out a response that is not just jumping hoops for the reward of grades. Obsolete means that my students start to drive their own learning. Obsolete means that I am more a resource than a director. After two years, I am getting there with my newspaper class. We’ll see how well it goes for my 10th graders. I am nowhere close to “obsolete” in that classroom, but I hope that my journey in that direction will lead them to become brave, creative writers and speakers, working in a supportive team. I hope their writing will thrive and grow and that their engagement will brighten. And I hope that they will remember it was human engagement, not a multiple choice quiz or reading summary notes online that defined their understanding of literature for the year.