Learn to Like Writing (And Get Better at it!) is a class born from the necessity of social distancing and the move from in-person to online group classes. Planning the new classes and curriculum for summer 2020, I wanted to create as social an atmosphere as I could online for isolated kids and make it as fun a way as possible to spend 2 hours a day, 4 days a week for a month out of their summer break. The class also needed to be strong on results, with so many reports I'd heard of kids having an educational gap in the school year. And it needed to be incorporated into a simple and functional system for online instruction.
This is when I really started to get excited about the benefits of online group classes! With everyone at a computer, and the internet at our disposal, options opened up, including virtual, save-able blackboards, video clips to click on, and the ability to see what students are doing, right down to each keystroke, and offer silent (and therefore unembarrassing) feedback via chat.
The most meaningful new element of online classes, based on biggest contribution to students' improvement in writing skills, is that students can all type their work onto the same group online document and learn from each other's writing. Imagine all the ways that students could benefit from seeing how others handle the same assignments! In a casual and organic way, students take a pause in their writing, look up and see other students' cursors moving, then get back to work.
Depending on the day, I will also join in on the writing, which not only gives the class yet another example, but also creates a friendly, all-for-one feeling between teacher and students. Other times I'm lurking in the background, watching the cursors move and chatting with students or typing comments about the work.
One thing I wasn't expecting was how well this format of group online classes works for elementary and middle school boys. Often this segment of the child population has trouble focusing on writing tasks, trouble using words effectively, trouble writing at length about anything...but in this class, they thrive! I believe it's the examples and the spirit of competition that comes from working on a communal page, coupled with my fun lessons, that does it.
Here's a lesson I just gave in the class: Care About Your Characters! First, we read scenes from The Princess Bride movie and talked about the personalities of the characters. ("Buttercup doesn't sound serious. It doesn't belong. It's like a name you would give a hampster!" one boy insisted. I hear you, little dude.) Then the students wrote a character study of Inigo Montoya, based on the monologue in which he explains his quest to find and kill the 6-fingered man in revenge of the man killing Inigo's beloved father. Then, I had each student invent a character of their own, any character, and write a character study. Then, they wrote a story about their character. Automatically, the story-writing improved. I asked the class why it helped to think about the characters when you write a story. "Because the character feels real and you are just telling a part of their life", one girl replied. Yes! That's exactly why. I hope they'll remember that when they write the next story.
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