Blogs! It’s always hard for us to explain the process we follow when trying to increase the student’s ability to complete a particular task. In this case, we have been inspired by friends daughter to explore the online publishing opportunity of blogs.
But, how do we teach students who rarely read, often have a lack of expressive language and who struggle with planning and sequencing in daily tasks, never mind complete a task that challenges all of the above and more?
Talk for Writing is a writing pedagogy that Pie Corbett et al. developed in the UK to increase student’s ability to write. It has seen successful results in areas where previously students have failed to meet minimum national standards.
Here at the LLLC, we have been practicing and developing our skills in delivering the T4W pedagogy over the past couple of years and have recently had the luxury of attending a training by Jane Ralphs, an experienced UK trainer. After this training, we decided to explore our newly improved skill by teaching the art of blog writing.
Step 1 – Baseline Assessment and Planning (The ‘cold’ task)
We explored some student-written blogs, and then we asked each student to write an introductory blog, explaining that a blog is an ongoing text and doesn’t need to be finished in one publication.
Next, we analyzed the areas of significant difficulty and noted each students’ specific goals within the task. Below is the video of areas we identified that our students needed to focus on.
Imitation Stage
After asking on the support pages and groups for other teachers and trainers that use T4W we were unable to source previously written sample texts, so with the help of my friend’s daughter’s blog, we created our own.
We used questions in each part so that student could write their own blog using their own words, but in a format that made logical sense.
We learned our 380 word written version (no more than 400 words, were our instructions from trainer extraordinaire Jane Ralphs!)
The students practiced it, (we tried choral, but it didn’t really work! They got confused with the first letter of their name), we used pictures for the first paragraph, but I kept forgetting that and they kept judging my drawing!
Overall, our students managed to immerse themselves into the introductory blog structure.
Innovation Stage
N.B. Our students are multi-aged (from Grade 4 – 12) and all have a variety of co-morbid learning difficulties, therefore the expectation was clearly delineated for each student. These differentiations included the amount of intervention the student had received, the age of the student and the severity of their learning difficulty. This was essential to ensure equity to all the students and to ensure every student gained as much success as possible.
Some students explored how to substitute words in the texts, where others already knew what they wanted to write.
Independent Application – The “Hot” Task
Some students now understood the task, they knew how to include all the information they wanted and they understood how to structure it in a way that the reader could enjoy it.
Variations
For others, it was more difficult, whilst they could offer the content, they were still lacking the structure, this meant we had to get hands on. We mapped back each paragraph to the original sample text, checking paragraph by paragraph, double checking that each question had been answered and was in the correct paragraph.
The students who had had the most intervention, were older or had less severe learning difficulties typed, wrote and edited their blogs independently. Those who were in the middle, wrote their work themselves and then worked with an adult to iron out any areas of confusion. The other students worked with a scribe (including other students as scribes). This ensured they were able to demonstrate their understanding of the content and structure as much as possible.