2020 has definitely been an interesting year, and that has delayed slightly a focus in to getting students to gather or obtain information from their peers.
Distance learning allow us to gauge independence when developing a blog post or a text type based on the purpose they wanted for their audience.
It was abundantly clear that consistent years of being made to assess the ability to recount had 2 negative effects. First the students seem disengaged and not really genuinely wanting to recount their learning. They also seemed to lack the ability to correctly formulate the structure of a range of other informative text types such as information report or explanations. This is where the previous blog post on the structural prompts and help came from.
The Next step was to see how even a well written blog post can be unlocked for further information and learning. We parked the idea that by now it is well ingrained in our students that they know how to write a comment. Greeting, something nice, or learned and perhaps some next steps.
Commenting allows people to build each other up and give positive affirmation, though is that going to increase shift or knowledge! Short answer is probably not...
So to start on this journey we needed to unlock how to question to gather information, before we could even entertain the idea of threads of learning conversations.
Open vs Closed questions is where we started.
