by Eleftheria Maratou

Why Is Collaborative Writing Meaningful Writing?

by Eleftheria Maratou, Middle School Faculty

Engaged students and meaningful writing are essential to fostering education, especially during online learning. This year, students had many questions about what was happening in their community and the world around them. Through carefully chosen texts, which sparked deep thinking and reflection, we discussed resilience and perseverance, and adapting to changes. The 6th graders analyzed characters following the protagonist’s journey through all kinds of conflicts and situations. Poetry played an integral role for my students to express a range of emotions. It evoked an awareness of experiences that affected them not only personally, but as a community of learners and young people whose actions impact others. We studied figurative language and how to use it to enhance writing. Students had the opportunity to see the power of words. They experimented with poetry and wrote their own poems. Their response to poetry was that of enthusiasm.

This year, I added to the curriculum poems by a young poet who I felt could be a role model for the students, Amanda Gorman, National Youth Poet Laureate. During the asynchronous session, students learned about her, social justice, and her poetry in reference to social issues. They watched her recite poems, which elicited questions accompanying asynchronous activity. In class, we analyzed her poem “The Hill We Climb”, which together we realized that most of the powerful lines of her poem(s) could apply to any country and people. In groups, the students looked at their notes, the vocabulary, and the lines from her poems which stood out to them and compared the similarities and differences amongst each other. The discussions were productive and thoughtful, sparking ideas. The culminating activity for our poetry unit was when the students collaborated in groups to create their own poems on social issues. Working in breakout rooms was challenging for teachers and students, but the task was broken down into steps, and they worked on their poems over several sessions. At the end of the day’s lessons, I saw my students being on task and passionate about expressing their world views. For these poems, all students had something to contribute. They took words they found powerful from Amanda Gorman’s poems and reframed them to create new meaning for their own group poems. Our students are familiar with the UN Sustainable Development Goals, and some chose those goals as a theme for their poems about our society and the world around us.

When I entered the breakout rooms, I heard students who were collaborating productively, by communicating and sharing writing on their google slides. They were problem-solving, respectfully compromising and helping each other, peer editing, and constructively criticizing. They did not want to stop when the session was over. Actually, a remark I heard in multiple groups was how at first it seemed difficult, but when one student started a phrase or line, the others in the group continued or added to it, and everything fell into place, and ideas emerged. Studnents reviewed and revised their poems and self-assessed on the process of collaborating and the guidelines they had to follow to create the poem. The poems created were impactful and moving as my students expressed their passionate feelings in writing about what they wanted to say to the world. What a glorious feeling it was to see this type of motivation and excitement of students when crafting their writing during online learning!