A Child's Words Can Change The World: The Journey of Teaching Activism to 6th Graders

There is nothing more invigorating for a teacher than a child who is passionate about what they are learning.  Standing back in a classroom filled with chatter about students' topics, curriculum, or learning inspires each teacher to continue that excitement day after day.  Unfortunately, as every teacher knows (or any person whom has attended school), our best laid plans and intentions do not always come to fruition, and the energy of one day does not guarantee eager to learn the next.  My hope over our extended December vacation was to come back with a writing unit that would engage all students for an extended period of research, writing, and learning.   Isn't that every teacher's hope, at every opportunity, during the year?  But that time to think, and reflect, and panic, and research brought me to an article that inspired me as an educator to further inspire my students.

Digital Magazine: It's Called Stress 

Digital Magazine: Violent Video Games: Why We Don't Need Them 

After much time thinking, reflecting, and panicking I came across an article on the National Writing Project website.  "Ten Ideas That Get Kids Writing": http://www.nwp.org/cs/public/print/resource/nwp/ten-ideas.html  It was in this article that I read about a young girl whom had been struggling with Anorexia.  She wrote about her journey with this disease and wanted to ensure that other students did not go through the same experience.  It sat with me - that message that a child's words can change the world.  I had often told my students of this important message, but rarely had I given them the opportunity to truly practice.  This needed to be more than an entry or a final draft they created just for me, but there needed to be a way to share this message with the world.  It amazes me how as a creator, and that's what we are as educators - a creator of lessons, once you are inspired you feel this overwhelming excitement and desire to keep going.

Digital Magazine: The Importance of Individuality and Listening to Within, Not Around

Digital Magazine: Is Football Too Dangerous?

We embarked on the first day back creating lists and short entries about things in the world we wanted to change.  I was beyond impressed by the variety of answers.  Everything from animal abuse to school stress to (my personal favorite due to the sheer humor and innocence) "Boys with long hair.  I mean seriously... What are they trying to say?!"  I reflected with them on the importance of their voice, and the next day we defined the word activism/activist as a class.  For quite some time I had been talking, fruitlessly, about being a "passive learner" - this was the perfect opportunity to reflect on wanting to change the world, or watching the world change.  This was the perfect opportunity to teaching them all of the reasons why their voices matter.

Digital Magazine: Inclusion 

Digital Magazine: School Vacations 

The librarian/media specialist and I gave the students the freedom to select their own topics, responsibly.  This invokes some natural elementary school teacher fear, as it often requires the move from database searching to true Google searching.  However, these students live in a world where technology is in their faces all of the time, and at some point we have to teach them to search responsibly.  Our students spent a couple of weeks researching their topics on the databases, and those that couldn't find enough supportive information, were taught how to "Google responsibly".  The librarian and I closely monitored their progress, and bounced important lessons off of one another and the students. 

Digital Magazine: Is Texting Killing The English Language? 

Digital Magazine: Negative Effects of Standardized Testing 

The second struggle was WHAT to do with these pieces.  It was important to me that they not only feel that they had a voice, but that they understood that other people would hear their voices - that's how you change the world.  And so I found glossi.com.  While I'm sure glossi.com never intended on being a website for educational purposes, it became clear that it was very user-friendly and, better yet, it was free.

Digital Magazine: School Food: Brilliant or Bust? 

Digital Magazine: Bullying

We had previously created a singular GMail account where each student had their own folder on google docs and created any writing that moved through the drafting process.  This made it most easy for my co-teacher and me to revise and conference with students online.  We had the opportunity to offer feedback, students had the opportunity to make revisions, and we instantly knew which students we needed to check-in with at the start of class.  Google docs had given me a sense of sanity during our fiction unit (where sixth graders often feel compelled to write a novel), and was once again one of the most useful tools in my writing class.  Drafting began, online conferencing ensued, and I felt like I had a grasp on the progress of each of my students.  In ten years of teaching, I have never been able to say that I had an understanding of the status of all students during a writing assignment.  Google docs has changed that for me as an educator, and more importantly, for my students.  It was easy to determine where students needed more research, more voice, grammar and punctuation assistance, etc. 

Digital Magazine: The Moments of Silence Needed for Many Of Our World

Digital Magazine: Benefits of Recess 

As soon as we began drafting, I did a brief lesson on how the glossi.com account worked.  I explained to the students that I was showing them the most basic steps in creating the digital magazine, but that they were really going to need to play with the site to figure things out.  In the initial presentation I gave them assigned pages for the layout; these were later taken away as I saw that by giving them a minimum I was ensuring that most students would only do the bare minimum.  By broadening the assignment, and giving them many options, many students pushed themselves beyond what I had originally assigned.  In addition, taking more time to research, write, and revise encouraged the students to really focus on the message for the reader, and take more pride in this assignment than your typical research project completed in sixth grade.  As students asked me questions about the site I often sent them to another classmate for help, or told them it was their job to play around with the site until they figured it out.  (Part of this was because of my lack of knowledge within the site, and part of this was teaching this practical technique).  When more than one student expressed a fear of making a mistake, I explained that there is always a back button, and that sometimes you have to make a mistake to learn how to do something correctly.  To this day, I don't know how one student made his cover page of soldiers' hats move, or another made his background shimmer an orange sunset, but I watched them teach their classmates and I watched them motivated to make their digital magazine the best.

Digital Magazine: Gender Equality 

Digital Magazine: Dogs Being Outlawed 

As in all units, and teaching, nothing is perfect.  While we spent a lot of time having them document their resources on their bibliography, in the future we will need to spend more time having them accurately quoting where their research was received.  Also, a skill that I continue to struggle teaching, and the students continue to struggle learning is putting things into their own words.  At the age of twelve this seems to be a hard skill to maintain throughout the whole piece.  These will be skills and strategies I will work toward improving throughout the rest of this year, and figure how to address when I complete this assignment with next year's students.  With that being said, my favorite moments in teaching continue to be the moments when my students' motivation to learn exceeds the hand holding and teacher-driven instruction they are so accustomed to at this young age.  Teaching them that their words matter and can change the world is the first step in giving them a sense of power through the written language.