Winter is coming to an end, and I find myself reflecting on the frosty mornings and moonlight evenings when sailing on the water taxi these past months. Winter is a wild time to travel by boat to school. There are many windy days where sailings are canceled. There are also icy mornings with frost-kissed docks and evenings when the moon lights the ocean like a beacon on the dark ride home.
As I have explained in another blog post, I teach at an online school in the Southern Gulf Islands, and half of my time (or one day per week) I work in the physical classroom on Salt Spring, and the other half of my time I teach online. Since I have students in both online and in-person settings, I can see the vast differences that can happen in the learning experiences. This semester in the Research and Practice in Learning Design in Technology Mediated Contexts class I am taking at UVIC as part of my Master’s program, I had the opportunity to create a learning design that helps to improve the outcomes for online learners. While the learning design is untested currently, I plan to trial it this spring.
The design is a Writer’s Workshop for students in language arts classes from grades 4 to adult. The Writer’s Workshop is a learning design for an online space where students revise and share their writing and where deep learning happens. The Writer’s Workshop allows students to revise, edit, and review their writing.
The design combines principles, theories, and frameworks, including the Theory of Transactional Distance, Constructivist Learning Theory, the First Peoples Principles of Learning, Reader Response Theory, and the four stances feedback method. The Theory of Transactional Distance speaks to the distance between learner and teacher in an online setting, and the Writer’s Workshop reduces this distance. Constructivist learning theory is in the design, as the learners who are part of the Writer’s Workshop have control of the learning process, work to construct their knowledge, and are active participants. The First Peoples Principles of Learning, such as that learning involves patience and time, comes into the design as revisiting written work can be a lengthy process, and the workshop gives space and time for students to edit their work. Additionally, to reduce the transactional distance, students must receive accessible and applicable feedback. Reader Response theory comes into the design of the Writer’s Workshop as a guide for providing student feedback as an educator. In particular, the parallel text response method is helpful in an online, asynchronous setting. Similarly, the four stances method of providing feedback is insightful for guiding peer-to-peer feedback activities. Future consideration using the Community of Inquiry framework and the PAUSE feedback framework could be used as the next steps for developing a more extensive program for teachers looking to extend the design.
Designing the Writer’s Workshop helped me reflect on the differences between online vs. face-to-face learning, and what I can do as a teacher to help fill some of the gaps for online learners. I plan to continue reading research about online learning in the coming months. If you are interested in reading the full Writer’s Workshop Learning Design, a link to the paper will be posted in a few weeks. In the meantime, here is a link to the Writer’s Workshop Lesson Plans.
Photo by Kylie Van Eaton. Port Washington dock on a frosty morning in January.