Going from STAAR... to ROCK STAAR

Mr. Martin’s 4th grade ELA class were in final preparation mode for the STAAR Writing test. They played a revising and editing Kahoot game.  “I wanted them to be able to have a fun way of showing what they have learned throughout the year, while helping to relieve some stress for the upcoming assessment." After the game was finished, he charged the students with sharing their feelings about their level of preparedness for the upcoming state test.  

Mr. Martin's Blog

Earlier in the year, they set up individual student Blogs using Blogger to define a space where students could share what they have learned, showcase reading responses and writing tasks, and to simply be able to express their feelings with school.  His initial intentions with the blog were to allow for  students to communicate with one another using a different platform to challenge each other’s thinking.

The task was to have each student search for a meme, picture, or emoji to represent how they were feeling before the test.  From there, students had to justify why they chose the picture they did.  Mr. Martin pushed them further to then make a comment on another friend's blog.  The catch with this is they knew the commenting expectations were to a) share something you enjoyed with the blog, and b) pose a higher-order-thinking question to the original blogger. This is the fuel to the in-depth conversation fire.

Students immediately took to their Chromebooks.  Some students were not sure what a meme was by name, but when they researched what it is and saw some examples, they knew exactly what to do.  This process was a completely student-driven as Mr. Martin was able to simply listen to students helping others and was able to even join in the online conversations.  

Zion was one student who really made the most of this experience. The thoughts that came out of her mind were completely mind-blowing.  She was a pivotal force when it came to driving the conversations.  Every blog I would read, she had already been to and commented with some fascinating questions.  For those students that were struggling with part B of the commenting criteria, she directed them to the wall of questions.  

Mr. Martin has taken the Bloom’s leveled planning question stems and adapted them to become a resource to enhance the level of discourse in his classroom.  Students were able to truly reflect on their peers thoughts by using this resource to their advantage.

"Through blogging, I have seen an increase of student participation, especially with the usually timid students.  With the ones who typically don’t like to respond in front of others, they feel completely open to sharing their thoughts from behind their screen.  In order to make this such a success, we had to build the culture of respecting other’s opinions and really embracing our online character through our digital citizenship lessons.  It is really powerful to see that this avenue of discussion has really allowed me to reach ALL students as it enables those who don’t feel like they have a voice, to shine." -Jeremy Martin