This post is part of a series on Agile Learning Center tools and 2015 ALC Everett #debrief
One of the Agile Learning Center’s “Agile Roots” reads:
Accomplishment: The 21st century world demands the creation of visible, shareable value as evidence of learning.
Without tests or grades, it is the blog post that can best visualize learning. In ALC Everett we give students the responsibility to create this evidence of learning through reflective blog posts. Each student, parent, and facilitator has a blog through their AgileLearningCenters.org account. To add further accountability, we made weekly blogging an explicit requirement in the ALC Everett Student Agreement:
Sharing of your work and play through weekly creative and reflective blog posts.
Progression of Blogging
In the beginning, most student blog posts were short and lacking detail. As we got started we eased into blogging by setting specific goals for each post. Early in the year we had begun a role playing game, and I had all the students use the blog to describe their characters. Here is Jurr’s post about his river otter ninja. For another project we all volunteered to write blog posts about certain aspects of our web development project. Here is Ethan’s post about online code education resources and Tommie’s post about how businesses use social media.
As we got more comfortable we started writing more reflective posts about our days. These posts started out quite small–in many cases, only a few sentences. As we continued to improve in blogging, we implemented a daily blogging routine through our Change Up Meeting. When we moved to a daily blogging schedule, the number of posts increased but students were still struggling to write more than a few sentences. Here’s the full text of an October post from Jackie:
today jurr and i have completed almost all the design for our website and it feels great to finish it!!!
We collectively recognized our lackluster blog posts and came up with a way to improve our posts. We started by switching up our afternoon meeting to come before our end of day blogging so that we could talk about our reflections for that day and prime our minds for writing about it.
We added to this by ending our reflection sessions with a brain storm for a primer question to get us blogging. Before we started blogging we would answer a reflective question, such as:
- What animal spirit most describes your day and why?
- What offering do you wanna do the most?
- What did you do today that didn’t use electricity?
- What was your most excellent adventure today?
Soon after we started coming up with a blogging question we also added a list activity. So each post would, at least, answer a question and produce a list. Some list activity examples:
- What are 5 thing you will most miss about Abe? (the day our guest facilitator left)
- What are 5 things you are grateful for?
- What are 5 emotions you felt most today?
- What are your 5 favorite things you did this week?
The daily blogging practice along with the primer questions improved blogging across the board. You can see this improvement in Jackie’s January 21st entry.