Feb.26: Reflection on Paula White's "Parallel Play or Collaboration: Leveraging the Wiki Platform for High Quality Work"

Here, Paula, a 5th grade teacher, introduces her wiki called WikiThink, which raises some very interesting questions about deep collaboration, creation in the classroom, and meaningful interaction between students and teachers such as... What is collaboration? What is the purpose of a wiki? Which are best? What are kids doing on them? Are they regurgitating or creating? Working alone or collectively?
I am always curious how to get students engaged. And, what exactly does it mean to be engaged? Paula mentions the 8 Qualities of Engaging Work, which include personal experience, choice, novelty/variety, learning with others, sense of audience, clear/modeled expectations, and more. The students, she said, have to want to be connected. It needs to be more than teacher-created structures and more student-created structures or groups collaborating on their own and not because the teacher told them to. This has been the greatest takeaway for me. Along with this, she says, "relationships built on honor and respect between people coupled with quality tasks is the formula for engagement." This is, of course, something I would like to foster in my own classroom. I want students to be able to work with other students and use their own strengths to research and create something meaningful. After all, I believe it is those lessons learn that mean the most to us, that we learn the most from. We, as teachers, have to not "play school" but teach our kids how to retain information and then apply what they have learned. " School is not the point, but a path."