I will admit, I was a little reluctant in this assignment from the start, but I have been blown away by the powerful results that can be achieved through collaboration. I had a stellar stellar group. They all worked SO hard on our website and on developing related resources, teaching strategies and ideas about how we could make this project meaningful and engaging. There is no way that I would have created nearly the quality of the finished product that we finished with had I worked on my own. No way. I am very thankful for the chance to work with these girls.
The depth and breadth of ideas that we were able to cover as a group was also fascinating. I have found one of the parts of the assignment that I enjoyed the most was reading the comments on the blog posts. Getting that interaction with my group member’s thoughts was fascinating and raised many additional issues and interesting topics to discuss. I think the most valuable lesson I learned in this project is the richness that can be found in a text though collaborative learning. Collaboration is a treasure I will seek to implement into my classrooms in the future!
I loved the multiple readings that we were able to extract from one text. I think that seeing how 4 university students were able to all have differing conclusions and opinions about one text has really portrayed for me how students will truly have very different experiences of a text. Because I didn’t particularly enjoy some aspects of the book, I also found it fascinating to be the student who was struggling to engage with the text and in the activities necessary to “unpack” the text at times. I would definitely want to give students as much choice as possible in the future so if we are doing a novel study and they think what we are reading is trash then they can choose a text that will be meaningful for them and provide as optimal opportunities for their learning as possible! No sense in students struggling and slogging through texts if they are not engaged or simply dislike the text. It wasn’t that bad for me, but it is very rare that I dislike a text at all, so it was a very good experience to “be on the other side of the fence” as they say!
The depth and breadth of ideas that we were able to cover as a group was also fascinating. I have found one of the parts of the assignment that I enjoyed the most was reading the comments on the blog posts. Getting that interaction with my group member’s thoughts was fascinating and raised many additional issues and interesting topics to discuss. I think the most valuable lesson I learned in this project is the richness that can be found in a text though collaborative learning. Collaboration is a treasure I will seek to implement into my classrooms in the future!
I loved the multiple readings that we were able to extract from one text. I think that seeing how 4 university students were able to all have differing conclusions and opinions about one text has really portrayed for me how students will truly have very different experiences of a text. Because I didn’t particularly enjoy some aspects of the book, I also found it fascinating to be the student who was struggling to engage with the text and in the activities necessary to “unpack” the text at times. I would definitely want to give students as much choice as possible in the future so if we are doing a novel study and they think what we are reading is trash then they can choose a text that will be meaningful for them and provide as optimal opportunities for their learning as possible! No sense in students struggling and slogging through texts if they are not engaged or simply dislike the text. It wasn’t that bad for me, but it is very rare that I dislike a text at all, so it was a very good experience to “be on the other side of the fence” as they say!