In the "Google DOCtoring" strategy, a Google Document is shared among the members of a small student group or with the whole class. My students will then collectively annotate text evidence and/or give responses to questions about the class text. This strategy pushes each student's sense of accountability to the whole group, and it challenges all of my students to be clear in expressing their thoughts in writing. Early in the school year, I use the collaborative notes from Google DOCtoring sessions to assess my students' understanding and to push individual student's thinking. Once students become accustomed to working on Google Docs together, this strategy is also an efficient way to collaborate and build text analysis together that can later be used for Socratic Seminars and essays.
Peer to Peer Scoring is a feedback strategy I use regularly to ensure that my students become comfortable with and skillful at giving and receiving feedback about their academic work. In most cases, I develop rubrics to assess a particular skill and I ask the students to use the rubrics to score their peers' work on a given assignment. This strategy creates a common understanding of high-quality academic performance and the standards we use to assess that quality. Peer to Peer Scoring affords my students multiple opportunities to explain clearly their reasons for coming to a particular assessment of their peers' work, thereby helping each student to internalize what rigorous intellectual work consists of. Peer to Peer Scoring is also an effective scaffolding strategy to prepare my students for their Senior Research Projects, a rigorous graduation requirement at our school that culminates in seniors getting feedback from community members.
Planning is an essential part of a blended teacher’s practice. In blended environments, where students can be at different points in a course on various modalities, blended teachers need to be very intentional about how they plan. Check out the video below to see how Johanna plans for instruction in her blended classroom.
A valuable routine not only for my students but for my own learning as well is the use of video recording in the classroom. Key events to record are our academic discussions, their individual oral presentations, and as much as possible, their learning process as they build their skills. My students have a Senior Capstone Project and are expected to be able to present their research findings in both live and digital form. This is one example of a project where video recording becomes a necessary tool. From day one of the school year, the video camera slowly becomes a part of the village that is my classroom. Before students are recorded themselves, I show a significant amount of footage from previous years, whether it be past seniors giving advice about student mindset or a snapshot of a Socratic seminar. Students learn quickly that the video camera can be an amazing tool for helping them to become excellent presenters, and we discuss its value in capturing individual "isms" where a student has a particular presentation habit that needs adjusting. I also find it useful to record students giving each other peer feedback in addition to my own feedback. There is an added level of accountability when students know their feedback will also be recorded, which then leads students to focus on the language of the rubric to understand what is truly being assessed.