Throughout the unit, students were asked to publish two blog posts per week on the class blog portal. Students came up with questions that they had about the play, attempted to answer their own questions, and commented on their classmates’ blog posts. These blog posts, comments, and replies, are now the starting point for their collaborative essays.

For the King Lear collaborative essay, I asked the students to first think of the topic that they were most interested in writing about, and to think about their own opinion and ideas regarding that topic. Then, students went to the class blog portal and noted all of the relevant comments from their peers.

Once the students have stated their topic and their own opinion, and they’ve listed their peers’ key ideas and their own key ideas, then students are ready to arrange their essay around their reasons, their defence of those reasons, and rebuttals to their critics.

Some of the topics they’ve come up with include:

• Who is the hero of “King Lear”?
• Why did Cordelia refuse to give her father the answer he was looking for?
• After being banished by Lear, why does Kent return?
• When does Lear lose his sanity?
• Did Lear give up his kingdom too early?

I’m excited to read these collaborative essays; they’ve really originated with the students and spring from the dialogue that they’ve been having on the class blog portal. The collaborative essay assignment requires the students to think for themselves and to be themselves; it requires students to put their oar in the water and join the 400-year old conversation that has revolved around the Bard.

I like Mr. B-G’s recent comments on teaching students to write:

How do we teach students to write? We teach them to think. We teach them to develop content. We help them understand ideas like elaboration and explication. We provide them with opportunities to stretch their minds and flex their intellectual muscles. We give them opportunities to pump out words and ideas without fear of judgement. We teach them how to think critically and make sense of their musings and meanderings. We show them how to tailor and edit and rethink and resee and rearrange. We empower them to be creators.

This King Lear collaborative essay assignment is so much more interesting for the class than the 5-paragraph essay format; it is free of the shackles of the 5-paragraph essay format that has been suffocating any potential talent. A collaborative essay assignment is… real.

——

Image by longhorndave

Though my current class will see some of my earlier focus — having students play the role of film director by making such decisions as how they would stage the ghost and who they would cast in each role, etc. — the focus this time is on the text. Because the culminating activity will be a collaborative essay (through the use of their individual blogs and comments) we’re spending a little more time than usual debating some questions, including:

• Is it important to the story whether or not Hamlet believes in heaven?
• Is Gertrude a sinister accomplice of Claudius? (Consider the deaths of King Hamlet and of Ophelia.)
• Could the ghost be a figment of Hamlet’s imagination?
• Is Hamlet mad?
• Is Hamlet really a tragic hero, or is he a villain?
• Does Hamlet really love Ophelia?
• Do Rosencrantz and Guildenstern get what they deserve?
• Does Hamlet have an Oedipus complex?
• Does Hamlet’s behaviour suggest that he’s closer to 16 than to 30 years of age?

I especially like the collaborative essay for this class, because I’ve got a group that is particularly fond of debate. Their first blog posts are up and their first comments are due by the end of the week, responding to at least two others that have approached an issue from an opposing angle. By the end of next week, partners should have surfaced for a virtual debate via their blogs, and by the end of the following week their collaborative essays, in a “They say, I say” format, will be typed.

I think that the current group that I’ve got will be able to pull this off and have fun with it. Time will tell.

——
Image by bansidhe

The idea for the collaborative essay comes straight from Pirie’s Reshaping High School English. Students begin by writing informal responses to their reading, which become the basis for small-group discussions and written exchanges between students. In their exchanges, students should practice the following:

• actively listening to the other’s ideas
• considering how that perspective impacts their own thinking
• and explaining where they agree and differ.

This exchange can then be transformed into a shared product that develops some of the issues raised. It’s important to emphasize keeping the tone friendly and respectful, as the main goal of this exercise is to stretch students’ thinking and empathy for others’ perspectives. I haven’t tried this alternative yet, but it strikes me as one that lends itself remarkably well to the medium of the blog. In their own blogs, students could reflect on their reading and then comment on one another’s posts. The first round of written exchanges could be accomplished in this way, and would be done in a way that allows students to learn from a broader group of classmates. Using a service like Diigo, which allows for web annotation, I as the facilitator could comment on specific points without getting in the flow of the conversation. I imagine the final product could take the form of a web/wiki page or a paper-based document. The former would allow students to easily reference specific points from their earlier exchanges, thus highlighting their own progression in thought. The latter might be more rigorous, however, taking the discussion offline and putting it in black and white on paper. It’s an alternative that I’m planning on trying next semester with my Grade 12 University students. Providing our school internet security allows us to get onto blogs, of course.

_____
Image by tosaytheleast