Twitter as a Tool For Academic Discourse

New Milford High School teachers Jessica Groff and Joanna Westbrook created a Common Core aligned English Language Arts (ELA) task that incorporated Twitter into their unit on Julius Caesar and built on content  authentic to the Shakespeare's history play – i.e. social media re-purposed with and for academic discourse. To accomplish their goal, these teachers began with an informational text on the history of the Roman Forum to ground their use of social media in historical discourse and academic content. This step gave students a context and purpose for using Twitter with this particular play and in this particular way.  In addition, the teachers worked with students to reverse engineer the rhetoric of Twitter and generate a list of the type of tweets students see currently in their daily lives. As a result,  students had more than one reference point and more than one access point to literacy content, something of primary importance to the in-class support (ICS) teacher collaborating with this team, Lorraine Montecuollo. 

Image credit: http://edtechreview.in/images/Daily/E-Learning/twitter_learning_tool.jpg

Next, the team worked with the Digital Media Specialist, Laura Fleming, to find a way to help students use memes to improve the content of their tweets. They used Mozilla Webmaker tool called Mozilla Thimble to create memes that allowed both the tech-savvy and non-tech savvy to present their visuals in a more professional manner, while bringing visual clarity, some humor, and some creativity to their responses. Finally, the results of this project illustrate that the social aspect of this project is important. Students not only interacted with one another in class, but also with students in other classes, as Twitter opened up their ideas to a wider audience.

Writing Scaffolds to Meet Diverse Learning Needs

As students work to master the complex reading and writing standards demanded by the Common Core, Mrs. Montecuollo and Mrs. Westbrook collaborated to create writing scaffolds that address the diverse academic needs of their 9th grade students. These teachers believe that differentiation is about access points. Therefore, they used four support activities (scaffolds) to address different areas of difficulty they see their students face.

Image credit: http://www.masoncontractors.org/2010/03/10/the-adjustable-scaffolding-advantage/

Scaffold 1 & 2:  Student Generated Exemplars and Writing the “Recipe” for Literary Analysis

First, Mrs. Westbrook created a task that required students to identify and interpret the underlying meaning of a piece of literature and then to make arguments about it. She began by showing a student written exemplar (Figure 1) to demystify the task and give students a concrete model for their own writing. Then students generated a list of the characteristics of literary analysis demonstrated in the example.  This strategy allowed the teachers to delineate the requirements for the task and tied those requirements to specific writing moves used in good analysis (Figure 2). It also provided clarity for targeted feedback. For example, Mrs. Montecuollo and Mrs. Westbrook could read student responses and be clear about what each writer needed to add or change in order to meet standard.

Figure 1. Annotated Student Exemplar 

Figure 2. Teaching Chart:  Rules for Literary Analysis

Scaffold 3:  Cloze Writing Technique

Another key to the success of this lesson was the third scaffold The Cloze Writing Technique (Figure 3).  This scaffold provided students with sentence starters gleaned from the student exemplar and allowed them to focus on the content of their arguments without worrying about how to begin.  As students struggled to articulate their ideas, they worried that their writing sounded “so simple” and “so elementary.” By helping students articulate their ideas more complexly, Mrs. Montecuollo and Mrs. Westbrook honored each student’s thinking. Thus, students were more willing to take a risk and push themselves from summary to analysis.  

Figure 3. Cloze Writing Technique

Scaffold 4:  Class Blogs as Formative Assessment

Finally, students posted their pieces to Mrs. Westbrook’s class blog (Figure 4). After posting the students received differentiated feedback to help revise their responses. In addition, the blog is public, so students had a real audience and real responses to reference as they worked to fill gaps in their writing/understanding/learning. In this way, these instructors maximized the learning for all of their students and ensured the class met standard. 

Figure 4. English 9 Class Blog

English 9 students blogging using a combination of their own devices, Chromebooks, and  MacBooks.