Over the past week, I’ve been sharing sets of tips that I always recommend to teachers who are beginning classroom blogging projects. 

The first entry covered questions connected to common technical questions:  Should I have one classroom blog or a blog for every student?  Should our blogs be open for commenting?  The second entry addressed the steps that teachers can take to connect readers and writers in classroom blogging projects. 

Today’s third (and final) entry is sort of a grab bag, sharing general thoughts about topics ranging from the role that visitor maps play in blogging projects to the importance of emphasizing high-quality writing in student entries:

Emphasize the important role that quality writing plays in successful blogs

Because writing and publishing online is so easy—and because interactions between students in electronic forums are often defined by casual grammar and language use—many students approach blogging with a careless attitude, failing to invest significant time into crafting polished entries. While they crave audience, they misunderstand the message that mistakes send to readers.

Not only should teachers interested in blogging projects encourage students to work through the steps of the writing process (brainstorming, drafting, revising and editing) before publishing—just as they would on traditional tasks—they should also reinforce time-and-again that the credibility of writers is dependent solely on the quality of their written work.

Students must know that the potential for having influence in online communities exists only when students present ideas in ways that will impress readers.

Consider naming and training student editors

Teachers who are starting classroom blogging projects often enthusiastically jump in with two feet, encouraging classes to churn out dozens of entries, promoting posts with parents and peers, and building new lessons with their blogs in mind.

Then, they end up buried by entries that are poorly written or by students who need technical help to get new pieces posted online. Eventually, they begin to question whether the time that they are investing in monitoring student work for quality and in facilitating digital novices is really worth it. Enthusiasm is replaced by exhaustion.

That’s why student editors are so important for successful classroom blogging projects. Training a handful—three to five per year—super motivated students to proofread new entries and to support students struggling with technical skills can ensure that teachers don’t suffer from “monitoring burnout.”

Over time, you’ll have veteran student editors who take great pride in the blog that your class is producing. Not only will they continue to write for you once they’ve left your class, they’ll serve as competent gatekeepers, polishing entries that aren’t quite ready to be published, monitoring comments that are being posted, and generating enthusiasm for the work that you are doing online.

Require that students use pseudonyms while writing

For many schools and districts, the risks involved in introducing students to tools for communicating, collaborating and publishing content online far outweigh the rewards. Frightened by stories of internet predators, restrictions are placed on the kinds of information that students can reveal and the kinds of opportunities that students can be engaged in online.

One step that you can take to keep your students safe—and to comfort district leaders who question your decision to begin a classroom blog—is to teach your students about the importance of remaining confidential online.

Resist the urge to include the name of your school or yourself in your blog’s title. Refuse to link directly to any sites that readers could connect back to your classroom, and require that students use pseudonyms to sign their writing.

As “cloak-and-dagger” as these efforts at internet safety may seem to you, your students are likely to enjoy them! Pseudonyms and confidentiality allow them to try on different identities and to be judged based on their thoughts instead of their age or their social groups.

And the first time that their work is mistaken for that of anyone older than they really are, your students will be electrified!

Include—and regularly explore—visitor maps and statistics on page views.

As motivating as local readers can be for student bloggers, discovering that visitors from all over the world stop by to read their work never fails to amaze tweens and teens. To prove to your students that they are reaching readers in faraway locations, be sure to include a visitor map in the sidebar of your blog.

While there are many services that will track the location of the visitors that land on your site, Cluster Maps (http://www.clustrmaps.com/) is one of the most popular because it highlights each visitor with a red dot on a digital image of the world. Before long, red dots will cover entire continents, reinforcing the idea that your students are being heard!

Cluster Maps also reports the number of page views that your website receives on a regular basis—and can break those page view statistics down by continent. Consider asking students to track this information carefully in their notebooks or on a classroom bulletin board.

Watching your readership grow over time will be just as motivating to your students as seeing where their readers are coming from.

 

So what ideas, tips and suggestions do you have for teachers who are tackling classroom blogging projects?  Is there anything that I’ve left out?  Are there points that I’ve made that you can improve on?

I’d love to hear what other readers are doing to make blogging work in their classrooms!

Last weekend, I shared part one in a three-part mini-series detailing tips and tricks for classroom blogging projects—and it was a hit!  Not only did the post draw a ton of attention, it also drew a ton of dialogue here on the Radical and in other blogs spread across cyberspace. 

So I figured it was time to share a few more teacher tips for classroom blogging projects.  Let’s see what you think of these suggestions, which all address cultivating and interacting with an audience:

Promote student blog entries to parents and colleagues

While writing for the Web ensures that your students will eventually have readers from every corner of the globe, the vast majority of your blog’s readers—and almost all of your commenters—are going to be the parents of your students, the students in the classrooms of your colleagues, and educators that you have made connections with in faraway locations.

Parents, colleagues and students in classrooms just like yours have a stake in the learning that your students are doing online. That’s what makes them willing to read what your kids are writing and to stop by to leave a comment every now and then.

Don’t let this discourage you! In fact, work hard to promote your students’ writings with parents and colleagues. Send out links to pieces that you’re particularly proud of or that are likely to stimulate exciting conversations. Ask parent volunteers to stop by once a week and leave feedback for the students who have posted new entries.

Not only do students need to receive feedback in order to remain motivated by your classroom blogging efforts, but feedback from those who matter—moms, dads, teachers and best friends—is often far more meaningful than the occasional comment left by an outsider, regardless of where they are from!

Remind students to respond to commenters.

As your blog begins to draw attention and starts to receive comments from readers, remind your students to respond to each comment directly, either in the comment section of their original entry or in a new post on your blog. By responding directly to readers, your students are showing their audience that they are listening—a key to encouraging return visits!

More importantly, however, responding to comments allows your students to take advantage of the primary benefit of writing for an audience: The ability to have thinking challenged over-and-over again.

Writers who make their core beliefs transparent are often introduced to new perspectives, and responding to those new perspectives—pushing back, refining original positions, articulating misunderstandings—is a critical part of the cycle of true learning.

Schedule regular readers for videoconference feedback sessions

If you carefully cultivate parents, peers and colleagues as regular readers who stop by to comment on the work that your students are publishing online, consider scheduling a videoconference to connect your students to a real member of their audience. By inviting a reader “into” your classroom, you automatically reinforce the idea that student voice really does matter.

Have your digital guest to describe what it is that they like the best about your student blog. Encourage them to share specific entries that they thought highly of and content strands that were motivating. Ask for areas of improvement.

Nothing can be more powerful to student writers than hearing from their readers—and hearing from readers is one digital step away!

The final part of this series will be posted sometime this weekend.

I’ve been doing a bunch of work lately with teachers who are interested in incorporating more digital learning opportunities in their classrooms.  Often, the first tool that they express interest in are blogs.

Blogs offer teachers and students a natural bridge between work that they are already doing (producing written reports and reflections on classroom content has been a part of classroom experiences since Socrates was stumbling around the agora with groups of learners) and work that they’d like to be doing:  Exposing students to a broader audience that can publicly challenge their thinking.

There are several considerations that teachers interested in blogging must think through before starting classroom projects, however.  Three of the most common questions that I’m asked about blogging in schools are answered below:

Should I have every student create their own blog?

Heck no! For blogs to survive and thrive, they need to have a constantly updated stream of content—at least 2 or 3 posts per week. Blogs that are not updated on a regular basis lose the attention of readers, who have plenty of other options in today’s digital world.

Because most K12 students will struggle to generate 2 or 3 meaningful posts per week—and because monitoring the content posted on 50+ blogs can be an overwhelming challenge for any teacher—it is best to start any classroom blogging project with one blog that every student in your class or on your academic team can post to.

While you’ll have to work with one username and password—which could lead to inappropriate or unpolished entries being posted by students that you don’t completely trust—your chances of generating an audience for your students are far greater when your students are working together to generate content.

Does blogging always equal writing?

Believing that blogs are ONLY opportunities for students to practice writing skills is a fatal flaw for most classroom blogging projects. Instead of digital soapboxes, teachers and students must begin to see blogs as interactive forums for continuing conversations around topics of interest—and interactive forums require two-way participation.

That means your students need to become avid readers of blogs, too. Consider organizing a collection of student blogs in a public feed reader that your students can visit during silent reading time or while surfing the web at home.

Encouraging students to read blogs written by other students serves three primary purposes:

1. Students who read blogs see models of writing that can be use as comparisons for their own work.
2. Students who read blogs are exposed to ideas for interesting topics that they may want to explore and write about in new entries for your blogging project.
3. Students who read blogs connect with potential audiences for their own ideas.

Should I open student posts to comments?

Absolutely—as long as you’re willing to review comments before they become “live” on your classroom blog.

The comment section on blogs characterizes the participatory nature of digital learning experiences.  Not only are blogs a forum for your students to express their own thinking and ideas, they can become a forum for thinking and ideas to be challenged—and challenged thinking is the primary source for new learning.  When readers force your students to reconsider their original positions, you’ll see a level of mental wrestling that you’ll be proud to celebrate in your classroom.

Don’t forget to systematically teach the skills necessary for writing effective blog comments, too, because commenting gives students opportunities to practice reacting to ideas in writing. What’s more, comments left on entries written by other authors can serve as first drafts for future posts on your own classroom’s blog.

Finally, commenting emphasizes the community nature of blogging and draws reciprocal readers—people interested in looking closer at the ideas expressed by your students—to your classroom’s blog.

 

I’ll post Part Two in this series of posts—answering more common classroom blogging questions—sometime next week

My first book—co-authored with my friend and colleague Parry Graham and titled Building a Professional Learning Community at Work—has finally hit the shelves!  My copies landed on my doorstep about two weeks ago, and I’m pretty proud of how it turned out. 

What you’ll see if you decide to pick up a copy is that we’ve started each chapter with the story of Steve—the fictional principal of Central Middle school—and his colleagues who are working to restructure their traditional school as a professional learning community. 

The stories that we include detail common PLC challenges—setting vision, overcoming conflict, wrestling with data—in an approachable narrative that will resonate with readers simply because they are drawn from real experiences that Parry and I have had in our work as both members and leaders of learning communities.  Through Steve and his peers, we’re able to share first-hand accounts of what life really looks like inside a developing PLC. 

Our stories are followed by research on organizational theory that explain the hows and whys of change in human organizations and sets of practical recommendations on action steps that teams in different stages of collective growth can take to move forward together.  We draw explanations from noted thinkers like Philip Ball, Clay Shirky, Roland Barth, James Surowiecki and Kerry Patterson. 

Readers learn about the ways that technology can decrease transaction costs, how phase transitions in physics—think water moving from room temperature to boiling—can can offer insight into change in school communities, and why the collective intelligence of multiple thinkers always produces better results than individuals working alone. 

Each chapter ends with sets of handouts—which are all posted online at Solution Tree’s website—that can be used to structure the work of learning teams.  You’ll find everything from surveys designed to collect information on team development and trust between colleagues to tools for helping teachers to make good decisions and to resolve conflict with peers. 

So far, our book has been well-received!  Rick and Becky DuFour were impressed enough to allow Parry and I to publish our title under their “PLC at Work” brand.  They also shared their excitement for the potential of our text in the introduction to our book, where they wrote:

One of the most common questions we hear from educators who become willing to implement the PLC concept in their own schools is, “But where do we start?”

Graham and Ferriter have answered that question, very specifically, in this powerful book. It is a wonderful contribution to the literature on Professional Learning Communities at Work, and we highly recommend it to educators at all levels who recognize that the practices of the past are inadequate to meet the challenges of the present.

(page xii)

Building a Professional Learning Community at Work has also caught the attention of one of my PLC heroes, Anne Jolly—author of Team to Teach:  A Facilitator’s  Guide to Professional Learning Communities, the newly-revised version of a text that saved my learning team from self-destruction almost five years ago.  In reviewing our text on Amazon, Anne wrote:

"What a terrific resource! The authors have done a great job of organizing this book - starting each chapter with a real-life story and ending with a set of practical tools that have been well thought-out. The "Tools for 21st Century Learning Teams" is a tremendously useful addition.

This book is well-designed, well-written, and packed with useful information. I can see myself using it in my own work with professional learning teams. Kudos to the authors! You've given educators a practical and engaging resource!"

I was also honored when Larry Ferlazzo, one of the most respected members of my personal learning network, found Building a PLC at Work valuable.  Larry writes:

"Through his book, I’ve learned that [PLCs are] basically about strategically and intentionally developing a “community of learners” among school staff.

Bill and his co-author Parry Graham have put together a very accessible step-by-step guide on how to go about creating this kind of culture, including ways to trouble-shoot potential challenges. The questions that it encourages readers to ask themselves and their colleagues might be the most important parts of the book."

In the end, I’m proud of what Parry and I have produced and I sincerely hope that it helps other teachers and school leaders who are struggling to make professional learning communities work in their own buildings. 

As a guy who has had his own professional career completely changed by the opportunity to work closely with motivated colleagues, I know how important—and empowering—PLCs can be when they are done right.  Our goal as authors has always been to show others what “right” looks like in action.

If you happen to read BPLC at Work, I’d love to hear what you think of it!  Be sure to leave me a comment with your feedback.  As a long-time blogger, I recognize the collective power that rests in the minds of my audience. 

Rock right on,

Bill

PLC expert Rick DuFour has started an interesting strand of conversation over at the All Things PLC blog this morning.  Referring to some of the interactions that we had in our recent Voicethread on professional learning communities, Rick wonders why teachers are unwilling to question colleagues engaged in questionable practices. 

He writes:

Not all behavior is professional. Not all ideas are of equal value.

If the very essence of a team is people working interdependently (rather than in isolation) to achieve common goals (rather than individual interests) for which members are mutually accountable (rather than every man for himself…then we must have the courage to engage in crucial conversations with one another.

The culture of every organization is determined to a large degree by the worst behavior people are willing to tolerate.

Now, I agree with Rick completely that questioning colleagues in a PLC is a professional responsibility.  Professional learning communities are defined by a collective commitment to ALL students.  No longer are teachers interested only in the 50 kids on their class lists.  Instead, they’re interested in identifying the kinds of practices that can result in learning for EVERY child.

But questioning colleagues is still really, really difficult in most schools!

I know that in my years as a member of a learning team, I've worked to question more than once and it rarely goes well---even when I remember to use my favorite Crucial Conversations tip:  Asking why a reasonable, rational person would act in a way that runs contrary to my vision of what is "right" or "should be." 

I think the barrier is that PLC work---especially in the early stages---is really, really difficult.  Teachers and teams wrestle with new practices and processes far more than ever before, and that wrestling can be completely exhausting.  It can also cause teams to question themselves.

I can remember several times where conflict felt like failure to our learning team.  We'd have intellectual disagreements (read: borderline brawls) about practices where feelings would get hurt and doubt would seep into our meetings.  Honestly, we got to the point where we didn’t even think PLCs were even possible.

Worse yet, we didn't have the skills for resolving our conflicts—preparation  for collaboration consisted of nothing more than crafting a set of norms and a template for meeting minutes—AND we were fighting against a constant barrage of "be a team player" messages that still surround schools. 

It felt like everything we were doing was "wrong"—and  because other teams weren't having powerful conversations, they weren't having conflict, which looked "right" to us. 

Crazy, huh? 

Luckily, we stumbled across a phrase—I think my friend and mentor Nancy Flanagan said it first to me—that we made our PLC mantra:

"Questioning isn't about the person, it's about the practice."

By remembering that simple idea, questioning became safer for those doing the asking AND for those being asked.  It served as a constant reminder that we valued one another as individuals even when we had disagreements about our course of action.  It helped us to pose questions—and to be questioned—in a neutral, dispassionate way. 

And it worked.

Teachers are so wrapped up in our practices—we own them, we craft them, we believe in them—and in the nobility of our work that being questioned can be one of the most painful and personal "offenses."  It is only when we take the focus off of the person that questioning becomes safe on a learning team. 

Any of this make sense?

Larry Ferlazzo has been one of the most influential minds in my own personal learning network for a long while now.  I first stumbled onto Larry’s work when In Practice—a collaborative blog that Larry writes with two other thinkers I admire, Brian Crosby and Alice Mercer—was up for an Edublogs award a few years ago. 

That’s why I was so excited when Linworth Publishing agreed to send me a free review copy of Larry’s new book, Building Parent Engagement in Schools. 

(Note to FTC:  Does that qualify as a full disclosure statement?)

As usual, Larry doesn’t disappoint!  His text—designed to introduce schools to the kinds of strategies and actions necessary for moving parent participation in schools from involvement to engagement—details a series of key principles that define effective community engagement efforts AND a series of practical projects that communities could tackle tomorrow.

Drawn largely from his 20 years of experience as a community organizer and his second career as an educator at a high-needs school in Sacramento, California, Larry’s thoughts and ideas have a measure of credibility that you just can’t find anywhere else. 

Through 96 pages of engaging text, he describes four main projects, including examples of each in action: 

1. A process for parent-home visits designed to develop strong relationships between a child’s two primary teachers.
2. An effort to develop family literacy through the use of computers and at-home internet connections.
3. The important role that cross-cultural spaces—think community gardens—can play in engaging immigrant populations that are often isolated in traditional schools.
4. The role that formal community organizers can play in supporting schools.

What made Larry’s book so powerful to me is that it directly challenges the traditional efforts made by schools to reach out to parents—chaperoning field trips, making photocopies, organizing bake sales. 

Larry’s argument is that taking advantage of the funds of knowledge in the communities that we serve requires a willingness to give parents real ownership over the projects that they are involved in AND opportunities to be involved in the academic life of a school. 

He writes:

“Low income and working class communities are often less successful at involving parents as providers rather than consumers of knowledge.  Teachers and other school officials too often assume that less educated communities will have a difficult time getting involved in the educational process….

Community funds of knowledge are a kind of social capital that is often overlooked.  Too often, minority students are described by what they lack, rather than what they have…

If topics of study are envisioned as an exchange between mainstream sources of knowledge and community sources of knowledge, then the knowledge which parents have takes on new value.”

(Ferlazzo, 2009, pp. 54-56, emphasis in the original)

What will make Larry’s book powerful to you is that it provides tangible examples of what meaningful parent engagement efforts can look like in action—and in a world where closing the achievement gap depends on strengthening the capacity of parents, those examples are nothing short of invaluable. 

Tad Sherman---a new education blogger who is writing about his experiences as an assistant principal over at The New AP---caught my eye the other day when he left the following comment on my Data Nightmare post:

One of the things that stood out to me was the number of times you said "I can" as you discussed all of the things that can be done with data.

As a person recently coming out of the classroom and moving into the role of assistant principal I suppose the thing that I think of is how can we move from "I (the teacher) can" to "My administrators do". Does that make sense?

What I'm getting at is the idea that as school administrators we need to be crunching the numbers and giving you the data in a way that easily read and understood.

This means that you spend more time adapting your instruction based on data. You know...the idea of "Data Driven Decision Making"!

Any other administrators out there? Is it realistic for us to be the number crunchers so our teachers can focus on instruction? I know I hope to be an administrator that can do that!

Great observation, Tad.  I love the distinction that you made between "I can" and "My administrator will" when it comes to crunching numbers primarily because it is the exact same distinction that Rick DuFour made in our recent conversation about professional learning communities. 

His point---made in response to my contention that data driven decision making is almost impossible for me because crunching numbers isn't something that I'm trained to do or that I have the time for---is that data driven decision making should NEVER be something that is overwhelming for learning teams.  For DuFour, administrators have the responsibility for providing teachers with data that has already been scrubbed and is ready for interpretation.

And if I understand administration correctly, this makes a lot of sense. 

From what I can tell, administrators have access to a TON more data than teachers have access to.  At least here in our county, there are pretty sophisticated online warehouses of data that administrators can access but that are closed to teachers.  Also, I often hear administrators talking about data presentations that they attend at the county level where district experts help to interpret learning trends and patterns.  Finally---and you can answer this for me---I suspect that the coursework for today's administrators includes some kind of data manipulation and analysis classes.

Now, I understand that not all administrators are going to be natural data pros, but in those cases, I think it is an administrator's job to repurpose a faculty position to become what I call "the data workhorse," whose primary responsibility would be to help gather, manipulate and present numbers to learning teams.  Heck, really innovative principals could identify and compensate one teacher leader per grade level to serve as data workhorses, solving a data nightmare and stratifying the teaching profession all at the same time.

My worry, though, is that this kind of "administrators will do" attitude hasn't taken hold doesn't in most schools.  In fact, most of the administrators that I speak to believe that teachers MUST do their own data collection, manipulation and analysis.  "That's a new skill that they're responsible for now that we're a PLC," one recently told me, "so they'd better figure it out!"

What's more, I get that administrators are in no better place than teachers when it comes to time and training.  Between handling discipline, organizing transportation, dealing with hiring, completing evaluations and supervising lunchrooms, most administrators that I know work all day, every day.  They certainly don't have heaping barrells of extra time to take on new tasks either.

To complicate matters, I'm even a little concerned that if we provide teachers with data that is scrubbed, we might just be taking away valuable learning opportunities.  While sifting through piles of numbers is killing me, it does force me to slow down and look carefully at information.  I know more about my kids now than ever before because I've been forced to do the heavy lifting when it comes to data.

But if we want to make data a priority----which we probably all agree is the only responsible decision in a world where every child deserves the best education we can offer---then something needs to give.   Either teachers need the tools, time and training to make data manipulation possible, or administrators need to take on that role so that the only data responsibility left to teachers in drawing instructional conclusions. 

The "just figure it out" approach just isn't working.

Any of this make sense?