The stakes are high; only about a quarter of students are writing at a proficient level (National Center for Education Statistics, 2012). No matter the subject, we teachers need to view each class as an opportunity to engage students with the writing tasks they need to be college and career ready. Simply assigning more writing doesn't lead to student engagement. However, I've found that adding two activities to my course design—blogging and collaborative response groups—sustain and motivate students as they practice and refine their writing processes for authentic audiences.
Blogging
Common Core Anchor Standard 6 emphasizes giving students opportunities to publish their work. In my class, each unit requires students to create blog posts that correspond to unit objectives. For example, if the summative assessment is an argumentative essay, students would write a short post practicing the skills needed to write an argument. Here, even practice assignments receive a public audience, which has led to increased student engagement during the early stages of the writing process.
In addition, a key part of the blog assignment gives students a chance to think about their learning. The blog functions as a place to practice writing, but students also use it to post summative assignments and reflections. In this way, the blog captures a student's work for the class in one place, provides an authentic audience, and requires other design decisions as students consider the genre of blogging.
In a nutshell, the blog acts as a platform for formative practice and as a hub or portfolio for publishing a student's work throughout the year. Audience is constantly on students' minds because they know their work will post to their blog. In addition to the macro-level audience that blogging affords students, their awareness of audience transfers to the micro-level as they participate in collaborative response groups.
Collaborative Response Groups
For each unit, students break into small peer groups and collaborate as they write. Because students know their work will eventually appear on their blog, they see their peers as an initial audience and a safe zone to develop ideas, resulting in the creation of each student's best work. We frame these collaborative learning groups as audiences, not evaluators. A class mantra, derived from Kenneth Bruffee's (1984) point that learning is a social process consisting of a collaborative effort to create knowledge, states that we are in this together.
These groups use steps from Peter Elbow and Pat Belanoff's Sharing and Responding (2000) to guide their work. For example, during the initial sharing of student work, group members give no response as a student reads his or her work aloud. This process gives the reader the opportunity to be heard, and makes the group focus on listening. When the group gives feedback, students use Elbow's strategies of "pointing," (identifying striking words or phrases in the writing) and "center of gravity" (identifying powerful moments in the writing). These structures for peer response help writers identify ways to enhance readers' experiences with the text by highlighting elements that resonate with readers.
"Believing" and "doubting" are two more of Elbow's strategies that my peer groups use to provide feedback that motivates student writers. In the "believing" stance, peers pose as if they believe everything in the composition and provide additional ideas for how to improve arguments. In the "doubting" stance, peers pose as if they doubt everything in the writing and identify problems and counter-arguments. Giving writers the chance to hear peer replies from both of these stances helps them develop more effective writing.
By using blogs and collaborative response groups to drive writing in my classroom, students develop writing skills in conversation and collaboration with peers and a wider audience. Students feel as if they are a community of learners working to learn material and skills that will not only help them do a fine job on a summative assessment, but will also translate into college and career success.
