Coetail Final Project: 23 March 2010

This, unfortunately, is the first time I have had occasion to write about a real disappointment with technology implementation in the classroom. The grade 6 team decided to do book clubs/literature circles. I created a website with links to synopses of all the different novel choices. After reviewing them independently, students submitted their choices to their respective humanities teachers and we placed them in novel study groups of 2-5 students.

As with most literature circles, students read independently and prepared for their groups' discussions by identifying important issues in the novel, interesting writing, questions about theme or plot etc. The discussions themselves went very well, in large part because of the kinds of discussions they learned HOW to have from our previous whole-class readings. Almost all students were active participants and brought interesting perspectives to their group's novel reading.

So where is the disappointment?

My dream had been to have cross classroom collaboration and it just didn't really materialize. Each book club had a counterpart in one of my teammate's classes, so there was definitely opportunity for discussion, virtual or face-to-face, and on projects. I even had ideas for projects on which we could have collaborated - fiction, research, character analyses - and so did my colleagues. It never panned out, however, because we didn't have (didn't make) enough time for the front-end planning. We ended up with different pacing for the book clubs, so our reading schedules didn't match. We had different reactions to the book clubs themselves, so we ended up going in different directions with the clubs. Meanwhile, I had thought that the powerful opportunity offered by our virtual and literary connection was organic enough that collaboration would materialize.

In the end, the book clubs worked in the most important ways (for the readers), but the added powerful dimension of collaboration will have to wait for next year. The nice thing is that this was our team's first year doing this and we all learned from the experience. All aspects of the implementation, on the technology side, will be better next year. I have a better sense of even the sites/tools I will use and of how I will plan with my team. All was not lost.