“What if I Did This as a Teacher?”
Got this e-mail today from one of the teachers at my school who has been sipping the blog Kool-Aid:
Hey Will. I’ve been doing all this reading about weblogs and journalism for a research paper that’s due Friday (for a graduate class I’m taking). As you know much of it goes into the value of transparency and news as a conversation. I began thinking about how I could use this with the Lamp and Journalism classes and things kind of went in a different direction. Bear with me here….
I was reading an article from the Neiman reports by Paul Grabowicz that said, “Weblogs also can give readers insight into the reporting process itself. This helps strip away the mystique-and misunderstanding-that surrounds so much of what we do as reporters.”
And it hit me, what if I did this as a teacher? What if I (or perhaps my student teacher) set up a weblog which demonstrates the lesson and unit planning process and invited feedback from students and parents? How many times have we listened to kids complain about a project we’ve handed out or called work stupid or a waste of their time? If we invited them into the planning process would they take more interest and ownership in their own learning? What if we posted the objectives and the content that needed to be covered and then let them see how we try to get them to reach those objectives and evaluate their learning. And of course during all of this feedback would be welcome.
As Dan Gilmour says, “Our readers collectively know more than we do.” I believe my students and parents collectively know more about US history in the 60’s and The Catcher in the Rye (for American studies) than I do, or perhaps the topics being covered in Journalism 2.
Alright. I’m done now. I’m sure I’m not the first person to think of this, but the possibilities are exciting. I don’t know if my kids would even care to participate or if the administration would be comfortable with this, but I’d like to give it a try.
So, what do you think?
Any feedback?
5 Comments
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I think using blogs to get parents and students (and other teachers) involved in *planning* is the best idea I’ve heard in a long time.
I just came out of a meeting where student involved as key users was the topic. I’m not sure if there’s any better way to involve them than to have direct input into the planning.
Sharing the process of designing a course, sharing the responsibility of all that would, in itself, be a tremendous education for the students. It might be much more important, really, than the subject matter to be covered.
It would be interesting to see how parents would react, though. Would they see it as participatory education or as the teacher not doing his/her job?
If this teacher decides to take the leap, I hope we will be allowed to watch it develop on his/her blog!
Fantastic idea. I give my students options all the time in the process. We often times create our rubrics together at the beginning of the unit. This goes a giant step further though.
Whenever I have given my students an opportunity to make decisions on a unit they have generally always responded. Great idea!
OK, exciting stuff, yeah. BUT, some reservations. Not about the idea itself, but the application: a) lots of people are still not online (and let’s think global here, not just the US), so there is a risk of “sorry, you’re on the wrong side of the digital divide”, and b) OK, so Gardner’s MI is not universally accepted, but the ones that would be INTO this (blogging) would be the verbal-linguistic types predominantly, I’m thinking. Yet the Internet does have the potential to support other kinds of thinkers (spatial/graphic types).