December, 2010, Collaborative Inquiry, 2011

December, 2010
This fall, for my collaborative inquiry, I decided to work with Kendra Farrell, teacher at the International School of Beijing, China (ISB). We have been communicating back and forth since we met in August. We have shared many ideas and resources, along with student work. Her students joined my Ning and have been posting images and comments. Kendra and I have similar expectations when it comes to  student work. We both empower students to create high quality, creative images, along with encouraging students to write with thoughtfulness and ingenuity. The students have responded well and enjoy reading each other’s feedback.

When asked to formulate my question for my collaborative inquiry, I sat down with a couple of colleagues for help in developing my question. The feedback that I heard was that my original ideas were too broad and I should pare my question down into something more specific. Therefore, my question ended up being, “What is the impact on students’ learning when they complete, share, and react to a common assessment with students from another culture?”

Kendra and I began the semester by giving the same assignment, called, “Keep it Simple”. Our students looked at the work of Andrew Nagl, a 17 year old, photographer/web desginer, from Baltimore, MD. This was a resource and assignment that I learned from working with Kendra. Her students completed this first, then my students did the assignment. They posted comments on each other’s images and were thrilled to see similarities and differences about how both sets of students interpreted the assignment from different parts of the world.

We have also done some other of the same assignments, such as “Shadow Photography” and most recently, “Out of the Window”. The “Out of the Window” assignment was probably the most dramatic. It was VERY interesting for the students to share ideas about what they saw when they looked out of their windows. The differences among the students in Beijing and the students in Yarmouth, Maine, as one might imagine, are quite different!

Kendra and I began sharing student work through a voicethread. Students submitted a photograph of their choice and then the teachers created a voicethread to share. Students then were able to comment on specific images on the thread. However, the problem was that they couldn’t continue a dialogue on the voicethread. It was a “dead” conversation. So, Kendra and I discussed how we might be able to encourage more of a dialogue among the students. Her students joined my Ning, where comments can easily be made back and forth, like a blog.

The impact on student learning, through sharing these ideas and images has been positive and engaging. Many of my students are very interested in and motivated to really look at the students from ISB school’s images and make their own comments, even when I haven’t required them to do so. This is probably the biggest and most satisfying, as their teacher, thing to see; my students, on their own time, enjoying looking and giving feedback to other students’ work. I check the Ning daily and can see recent activity; it is exciting to see a dialogue back and forth between the students from differing parts of the world. When someone makes a comment on a student’s image, that person receives an email letting him/her know.

The downfall to this is that there are some students who have not received any comments from the ISB students at all. This is something that Kendra and I have discussed but have not found a good solution. When we ask students to comment on each other’s work, they choose images on which they want to comment. It is difficult to make the students comment on specific works because then it is not as meaningful, it is forced.

After sharing images and ideas for several weeks, I asked Kendra if she would like to Skype with my students. We decided it would be an interesting idea to connect our students in person. In preparation for this, her students and my students developed a series of questions and posted them on the Ning. Both sets of students were able to see the questions ahead of time to give the questions some thought.