When I began teaching 14 years ago, I was on a team with a science and history teacher. Even so, I felt alone in my practice. Although we met weekly, shared the same group of students, and collaborated on large-scale projects, time was always an obstacle to meaning-ful collaboration. There never seemed to be enough opportunities or time to get together and meet face-to-face.
Enter technology. Just as technology has allowed my students to connect, communicate, and collaborate with peers beyond our classroom, it's also done the same for me as an educator.
Getting Connected
In 2010, I began my blog. I enjoy writing, and I wanted to share what I was doing in the classroom with other teachers. I was also struggling to build a reflective teaching practice. Blogging gave me the outlet I needed to slow down and take an honest look at my teaching. Each week, I asked myself, "What are you doing? Why are you doing it? Is it working for your students?" That consistent reflection challenged me to reexamine many of the ideas I'd been taught as a new teacher—like the idea that it was my job to disseminate information and my students' job to absorb that information.
Blogging helped me find my voice as a teacher and gave me an authentic audience. In the five years since I began my blog, I've connected with thousands of teachers, shared hundreds of posts, and developed a clear vision of why I do what I do.
My blog, combined with my activity on Twitter, has helped me build an invaluable personal learning network of excited, progressive, generous educators looking to redefine what learning looks like. I no longer feel alone in my practice. If I have a question, I post it on Twitter, and in minutes I have dozens of replies pointing me to resources. I feel more supported and engaged in my profession than ever before because of my connectivity.
A Cross-Classroom Collaboration
My positive experience connecting with other educators online motivated me to get my students connected as well. At a conference in Palm Springs, I met up with another English teacher, Megan Ellis, whom I'd been in touch with through my blog and Twitter. At the time, she taught middle school English in Palo Alto. As we talked about teaching, technology, and our curriculum, we discovered that we both taught a book related to the Holocaust—she taught The Diary of Anne Frank, and I taught Elie Wiesel's memoir Night. We decided to use technology to join our classes for collaboration. Despite the 100 miles between our classrooms, we would teach in tandem!
In the past, I'd had my students write Holocaust journals. Although many of my students enjoyed the creative-writing element of the assignment, the quality of their writing wasn't great. I now realize that my students had no real incentive to make it great. No one but me would read their journals, so why spend a ton of time on them? The reality is that most of my students don't care about impressing me, but they do want to impress their peers. I decided to give them more of a reason to care about the quality of their writing.
Mrs. Ellis and I paired each of her middle school students with one of my high school students. We created a shared Google Document for each pair, which included a template with two columns, one for each student to use for his or her journal entries.
The students began by researching individuals who lived during the Holocaust. Each student selected an actual person and wrote a short bio about his or her life. Then they wrote their journal entries from this person's perspective, blending facts with fiction. Over five weeks, students wrote one entry for each stage of the Holocaust, engaging in a dialogue about their experiences. They asked each other questions, highlighted similarities and differences between their situations, and offered kind words of comfort and encouragement.
Because Mrs. Ellis and I could access the shared Google Documents, we were able to share the responsibility of teaching narrative writing and providing detailed feedback to students. This not only increased the amount of timely feedback students received, but also gave each student the benefit of comments and insights from two different teachers. We provided notes about how to strengthen their writing with narrative techniques, improve word choice, develop sentence structure, and engage their partners in a conversation by asking questions and commenting on specific elements of their partner's journal.
As with any collaboration, I benefitted from having another person to bounce ideas off of and consult with. The design of the project was stronger because we worked together to construct the writing template with enough structure and information to support students as they wrote.
When we initially presented the project overview to our classes, we were surprised by the enthusiasm that greeted the announcement. Mrs. Ellis sent me a Tweet a couple hours after we shared the Google Documents to exclaim, "Some of my students have already completed the first entry!" It was clear that students were eager to participate because they had an authentic audience. Her group wanted to write well enough to engage high school students, and my older students wanted to model strong writing for their younger peers. The outcome was some of the most compelling writing my students have ever done.
As students approached their final journal entry, they began to ask whether they could meet the other classes. Mrs. Ellis and I coordinated times and set up a series of Google Hangouts between our classes. We had a group conversation about the project. We invited students to share their thoughts about the project in general and then allowed individual writing pairs to meet virtually. Students commented on each other's writing, mentioning specific elements of their narratives they enjoyed. A boy in Mrs. Ellis's class said his writing partner painted such a real picture of the girl's life before she was deported that the loss of that idyllic life was all the more tragic. A 10th grade girl in my class marveled that a student three years younger could write such a powerful and heartfelt journal. She said she looked forward to reading every entry because her writing partner was a gifted creative writer.
When the project was complete, our students were enthusiastic about the experience. One student expressed the general consensus: "I felt like we learned way more with this than we would have if we had written an essay."
Teaching in an Age of Connectivity
It's now easier than ever to connect with, learn from, and collaborate with other educators all over the world. Support and resources are just a Google search, Twitter conversation, or Pinterest board away. If you want students to learn about Shakespearean sonnets but that isn't your area of expertise, you can ask another teacher who loves Shakespearean sonnets to Skype with your students. If you want to expand your students' understanding of a particular culture or country, you can coordinate a virtual pen pal project with a teacher in that country.
Our connectivity to information and to one another makes this an incredibly exciting time to teach. Our collaborations are no longer limited to a school campus, and we no longer need to feel alone in our teaching practice.
