Further to a previous post on my student’s commenting skills, I decided to explore the issue in a teaching unit recently. The series of lessons fit into our English syllabus as they involve Talking & Listening, Reading and Writing.
I wanted to improve the commenting being undertaken by my students.
We started our discussions by looking at lots of comments on many styles and types of blogs. Students classified them into 3 star, 2 star, and 1 star comments.
We cut and pasted some comments onto one page and discussed these comments further, trying to find examples of what good comments were.
Next, students tried to articulate the aspects of comments that made them worthwhile and meaningful to them as recipients. What did they, themselves, feel was useful in a comment?
We looked at some sentence starters we had up in the room, and why they were good.We looked at open-ended question starters that we use in our Reading Circles and discussed how they were useful.
We had a chart in our room that we had made earlier in the year that had our class requirements for commenting (full sentences, grammar, punctuation, positive, constructive).
We discussed this and realized that we had to add other criteria as well. We came up with a number of areas that were missing from our original chart:
- Links – to our own life and experiences
- Responding – to what the blogger is saying/ thinking/ asking
- Conversation – between the blogger and you, asking questions for clarification, for more info
We found it really hard work:
- to respond thoughtfully to what the blogger was saying, and to respond to their message.
- to articulate what was required in a great comment
But we all have a clear definition of what is required now 🙂
PS: we practiced our commenting on our blogging friends blogs, and this is what Mr Pearce from Geelong in
Victoria had to say recently
2 thoughts on “Commenting Confidence”