Helping Students See the Point of Writing

The title of this post is also going to be the name of a workshop I'm going to give soon. For this workshop, I'd been thinking about so many activities I had done before, but today, however, this one worked so incredibly that I just couldn't give its post some other name.

Last night, I was thinking about how I would teach nine-year-olds the lesson found on pages 130 and 131 of Spotlight on English 3 (Thomas Bilíngue 5th grade). You can see the pages in the picture below. It is a writing lesson. They are supposed to write an editorial at the end.

I was sure that the best way to allow such young students to learn a little and be engaged in this lesson of mine would be to have them experience the real thing. After all, if writing isn't real, it means nothing to the students. I googled a bit and found this cool website with interesting Google Doc newspaper templates. Then, the idea stroke me.

Still in class, as a pre-writing activity, we sat on the floor and I showed them the template I decided to use (the second one on that web page), asking them whether they knew what that was. They looked at it and easily came up with the word "newspaper". We had a chat about what an editorial is and how it must be based on facts, not opinions. Then, I had them do some mind-mapping on a poster with these slips I printed and cut out. They came up with the name of their newspaper and the facts to support the topics they wrote about. I brought some suggestions of topics and they decided which one they would write about.

Once they had their editorial jotted down on their poster, I took them to the Resource Centre at the main branch. They accessed a shortened link I had made for them to access the collaborative Google Doc (bit.do/tb5editorial) and started working on their editorial columns. They did everything: they chose the name of the newspaper, they wrote their columns, they selected the pictures on it. Please, access the link and see what it looks like now.

I honestly don't feel that I had a lot of options and I decided to be innovative. To me, this was the only option. I was definitely going to make my students create a newspaper and write an editorial on a collaborative Google Doc. Only after the lesson had finished, when I saw what they had made, did I realise how amazing all of it had been. The process. The experience they went through. How they collaborated with each other by proofreading what their buddies were writing. After all, my students...

• made something and learned as they made it.
• produced something unique and in their own pace.
• got engaged in an authentic and meaningful activity.
• collaborated with each other by alerting their peers on punctuation and spelling mistakes (21st century skill).
• had their voice heard by creating something that can be published and read by other people.

Now, I'm trying to find a way to have the newspapers printed out so that my students can take a sample home and so that we can also make their work available in the Resource Centre for people to pick and read.

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.