Written Response

This year I wanted to work on having students read and respond to somewhat academic articles.

My first attempt was posting the link to this article for my older students in Google classroom. I asked them to read it and then come back and type a comment about how they could relate to this article but not post it. Then, I counted to three and we all posted at the same time. Next they had to read everyone's comments and respond to at least one. I liked this idea because everyone's voice was 'heard' but nobody could be accused of copying since we all posted at the same time. And some students were surprised to see that almost everyone felt the same way.

I have to share some excerpts:

My second attempt was with this article. I posted a list of questions as a google doc and students had to write a short written response. Here is the link to a copy of the doc. As I was grading them, I pulled one quote from each person's paper. I posted all of the quotes, with names, as a google classroom post. I asked them to read all of the comments and then respond with either "I agree with ____ because ____" or "I disagree with ____ because ____". This did not go over nearly as well as my first attempt. I would recommend either the comments or the written response rather than this weird combination of the two, to be honest.

I do a semester paper twice a year so I considered this a baby version of that since it was less than a page. I'm mostly looking for their ability to follow directions, meet a deadline, and to put their thoughts into sentences. But I also wanted to do a little check to see if they actually read the article so I gave this 5 point pop quiz. Spoiler alert: they did not all read the article.



Next up are these two articles.