Sparking Conversation

At a recent educator conference, I attended a session on student blogging. The presenter, an elementary school science teacher, showed us a blog to which all of his students had contributed. Each of them had completed the same lab activity, and their assignment was to blog about what they did in the lab and what their results were. This teacher considered the blog to be a great success. His only frustration was that he had quite a bit of trouble encouraging his students to comment on each other’s blog posts.

A few months earlier, while preparing to contribute to a collection of writings about Professor Eleanor Duckworth, I had spent time sifting through journals I kept while taking her education courses years ago. Journals like these are exercises in reflection: They begin by recounting something that happened and then proceed to focus on some combination of analysis and synthesis, identifying a connection between the particular moment and the larger topic at hand. And I found, both back then and as I prepared my journal excerpts for publication, that sharing these reflections with others typically sparked even more interesting conversation about the larger topic.

While Eleanor Duckworth’s courses no doubt would have been incredibly valuable even without the journaling requirement, it was the journaling that helped me construct my own understandings of what was happening in the classroom and allowed these experiences to influence the direction of my thinking as an educator. It is clear to me now that journaling was no afterthought to the course design; rather, it was an essential component that facilitated the personal meaning-making and discovery that lie at the core of the methodology.

So how might this shed light on why the conference presenter’s science students were not commenting on each other’s blog posts, even as they clearly were excited about using the blogging technology?

My sense is that his students were engaged not in reflection but in reporting. All they had to do was write about what happened and then stop. Since every student conducted the same teacher-designed lab activity, most of the resulting blog posts looked identical to each other. What was missing was the thinking — the wondering, the theorizing, the seemingly tangential connection that ultimately leads to a sophisticated idea. These are the things that are worth commenting on, that are worth discussing further. What were these students really expected to write in response to a sea of identical science reports?

As Eleanor Duckworth has written in a slightly different context, “A problem is not a problem unless it is a problem . . . Nothing happens until the interest has been touched.” Since no problems or items of interest were raised in these students’ blog entries, nothing happened in response.

All the new technology in the world won’t engage students in their learning if the substance of the learning itself is not engaging. And if it is engaging, a skillful teacher should be able to facilitate the sparks of conversation, whether online of off.