Teaching writing in Google Classroom

This has been my second experience doing it so far, and I like to think about this post as a sort of diary entry. Teaching in Google Classroom almost feels like conducting a workshop where attendees do everything and get to the conclusions by themselves. Since this was the writing lesson, its flow was far better than the one I designed for the review lesson day. It was also far more challenging to do it. I believe this was so because a writing lesson has all its elements and moments converging upon one central idea (or production). The review lesson, however, is not about learning something new. It's actually only about practising and self-assessing.

For the review lesson, it was easy to create different and independent tasks inside Google Classroom. They are not connected and that is okay. There is no reason for so. The students still get it. It is the review lesson. They are supposed to practise different activities and do different things.

For the writing lesson, on the other hand, connection and scaffolding are essential. There must be a logic and a sensation of closure at the end of it that equips students with the certainty of what they have to do next and the confidence to do it.

For all the reasons I listed in my last post for which I would teach in Google Classroom again, I decided to do the same in this writing lesson. It is not only for the sake of doing something different, really. It is honestly because writing lessons have never felt to me as effective as they could be (or could have been), and making students more independent and proactive in such a lesson really seemed promising.

This time, instead of scheduling the assignments to be posted at the class time, I saved them as drafts. In class, I would release them to the students from my mobile phone and allow them to follow their own pace, working in pairs and independently. Below, you can see the tasks I came up with using different tools:

TASK 1 - Analyse the report
TASK 1 - Analyse the report (Answer key)
TASK 2 - Analyse the report
TASK 3 - Expressing results
TASK 4 - Expressing results
TASK 5 - Building my writing
TASK 6 - Writing my report
TASK 7 - Sharing my report

How did it go? All students were able to reach task 5. Some students not only finished task 6 but also began writing their first draft in class. There was one student who barely got to task 5 and produced something in it, but this one is usually like this in all lessons. Task 7, however, was actually done two lessons from this one, in which students had to give each other some feedback.

Again, the fruits of this lesson could be seen as soon as it started. The truth is that there is so much production and collaboration that has to take place that students have no other choice but take up one challenge after the other and help their partners. Since the teacher is not in the centre of everybody's attention, there are no moments in which some students are waiting for others to finish their activities. Therefore, there are no gaps for students to speak Portuguese or start deviating from the lesson goal.