Phase 5: Organizing the Circle Publication
The Circle Publication
Many interesting projects in classrooms fail to make
a lasting impression on students because the time was not taken
to look back and review what was learned. The Circle publication
plays a critical role in motivating students to organize and evaluate
the information that they received from other students. Adults have
a sense of the whole task from the beginning and can often anticipate
the overall structure. For students, the project unfolds slowly
and early messages are often forgotten as they proceed to the end.
Analyzing Project Information
Each class organizes the information they received
for their sponsored project into a section for the Circle publication.
This process will help them learn how to review, summarize, evaluate
and arrange information. Preparing the information for other participants
in their Learning Circle and for parents and educators who will
read their Circle publication gives students a clearly defined purpose
and audience for their writing.
Your students' contributions to the other projects
give them a very personal reason for wanting to read the work of
their partner classrooms. In this way they will benefit directly
from the educational activities that took place in the distant classrooms.
Editing Student Writing
Each class organizes the work they received for their
sponsored project into a section for the Circle publication. This
process will help them learn how to review, summarize, evaluate
and arrange information. Preparing the information for other participants
in their Learning Circle and for parents and educators who will
read their Circle publication gives students a clearly defined purpose
and audience for their writing.
Your students' contributions to the other projects
give them a very personal reason for wanting to read the work of
their partner classrooms. In this way they will benefit directly
from the educational activities that took place in the distant classrooms.
Teacher's Role
During this phase your students will need to plan
and organize their project summary or section and then print and
mail it to the other classrooms. All of the completed project summaries
or sections will then be assembled to make up the Circle publication.
As always, it is important to use subject
headers as well as online conference structures to make it easy
for your partners to locate your messages.
As the students begin working on summarizing their
project, it is a good time for you to work closely with the other
teachers to plan for assembling your publication.
Planning for Your Circle Publication
As more teachers and student have access to WORLD
WIDE WEB it will become easier to create their final publication
in electronic format and post it on the Web. This will reduce the
cost of printing and allow for a wider online distribution. However,
in some communities it will make it more difficult for students
to share their work with their parents and other people in their
local community. Your circle will need to plan for either online
or print publishing. Some Circles may attempt to do both.
Circle Publication Production Manager
Some Circles have found that it is helpful to identify
a teacher as the Circle Publication Production Manager. This teacher
would oversee the printing or assembly of the Circle publication.
In some cases this person will have special resources for printing
or will have access to a site on the Internet for publishing. This
person may offer to post or print the whole publication, but this
is not necessary.
The Production Manager takes on the responsibility
of checking with the other classes to find out when each of the
project summaries will be ready to mail or post and creates the
table of contents for the publication. While the Learning Circle
Facilitator sometimes offers to also manage the Circle publication,
this is a chance for another teacher to take on a special role in
the Learning Circle.
Distributed Expertise
If no one volunteers to take a lead role as production
manager, the task can be divided up so that everyone participates
in the publishing and no one school has more than a small number
of pages to publish. The most common procedure is for each class
to create a print version of their project summary and send it to
the other sites through postal mail. The summaries (varying in style,
materials and print quality) are assembled into the Circle publication
at each site. In this way all of the students are involved in the
final printing and there is no duplication of effort.
Some teachers have found it productive to team up
with teachers in their school or a nearby school who teach desktop
publishing. Students from these computer classes take on the task
of publishing the summary as a special project. In a few cases,
teachers have found parents with compatible equipment who were willing
to volunteer their help with the printing.
Once you have a plan for how your class will publish
your project summary, you will want to share
the plan with the other people in your Learning Circle. This
will help others as they make similar decisions or suggest alternatives.
Organizing Your Section of
the Circle Publication
It is very important to save the messages that are
received on disk and in print. Often a bulletin board with a place
to post current messages and folders for filing last week's messages
are helpful. Your section may involve analyzing information or evaluating,
selecting and editing student writing.
Analyzing Requested Information
You and your students will need to develop strategies
for recording, examining, and summarizing the information that you
requested. Students can help plan how they will save, store, and
compare the messages. If they requested student essays or other
writing forms for their project, they will have to evaluate those
received and select and edit the ones to include in their project
summary. Some information may need to be integrated. If they asked
all sites to collect data or respond to a number of questions, it
is not always informative to just list all the responses by each
site. Sometimes a narrative summary of the responses is effective.
Or students may want to compare the responses from all sites to
a single question. Sometimes listing the schools on a continuum
or grouping schools with similar responses will help students understand
the relationships.
There is no way to provide the perfect format for
the presentation of the different types of information you will
be collecting. The important thing is to help students think about
how to best display the information and explore what they have learned
from collecting the information. This last step is essential. Students
need time to reflect on the activity as a whole. Here are some
ideas on how to organize this in the classroom.
Evaluation Strategies
The goal of these strategies is to help students learn
how to evaluate writing received from partner classes. The role
of the teacher is to help students learn the importance of constructive
evaluation. For example, if a student says, "I think this article
should be rejected because I don't like it," the teacher needs to
help the student specify what features led to that overall assessment.
One way to do this is to say that "not liking it" does not help
others know how to improve their writing. Then the student can be
encouraged to think about the reason that led to the assessment.
Was the article poorly written, badly organized, or about a topic
that was not of general interest? Was there too much or not enough
information? As students begin to form evaluation standards to apply
to the writing of others, they also begin to apply these same criteria
to their own writing. This internalization of writing standards
is the real value of the editorial process.
As you receive articles that have been written for
your section, you will want to help students develop a system for
rating them and a way to classify them. There are many ways to do
this. The editorial board review that was described at the opening
of this section is one way. If done early enough, there may be time
for the distant authors to revise their submission based on the
comments of the editorial board. Here are some other ways to organize
the review process.
Length of Your Project Summary
Teachers often want to know how long their Learning
Circle project summary should be. The length is something you will
want to discuss with the other teachers in your Learning Circle.
It will also be different if you are creating a web or print publication.
Here are some general guidelines for a printed section.
You will be working with a group of classrooms. If
your group is small, your summary can be longer or more detailed;
but if you are working with 9 classrooms, you will need to be more
selective. Making student copies of a long publication can be costly.
It is a good idea to discuss the overall length at the beginning
of this phase. In some cases groups have set limits, like no more
than 8 pages per project or 3-5 pages per project. In other cases,
they leave the decision up to the classroom sponsoring the activity.
There is no need for all the project summaries to be the same size.
Each classroom should prepare a title page for their
project summary. It is important to give credit to each class that
participated in a project. This can be done by either crediting
students' work in the project summary or listing names of the participating
classrooms in an acknowledgement box.
Printing Your Section of the Circle Publication
You may already be familiar with a word processing
or desk top publishing program that allows for easy layout and printing
of the information that you have selected for your section of the
publication. If you have never used a desktop publishing programs,
you might find that learning to use it now will be too time-consuming,
especially with younger students. It is often much quicker to do
the layout by cutting and pasting
the printed text.
Web Publishing
Publishing online or creating an online summary of
your Learning Circle Publication provides an alternative way of
distributing your student's work. As the tools for this process
become easier, this will provide an efficient way to share student
work. If each school has a home page, you could each publish your
section on your home page with links to the other sections. Another
way to accomplish this is to find a site that is willing to post
the whole the document with pointers to each of the school's home
pages.
There are some examples of project and the outline
of web
publications as school are beginning to explore this way of
creating online publications.
Assembling the Circle Publication
You and the others in your Circle will have created
a plan for exchanging the project summaries. If you have a Production
Manager who has agreed to print the whole publication, then you
will be sending your edited summary electronically to this person.
He or she will be setting the deadlines and will take responsibility
for assembling and mailing and or posting the Circle publication.
If each class prints and sends its own project summary
to all of the other participants, here is what you will need in
order to assemble the Circle publication.
THE CIRCLE PUBLICATION
A Cover Page (or Web Page)
An Opening Letter
A Table of Contents
Meet the Classes (or Links
to School Home Pages)
The Learning Circle Project
Summaries or Sections
Once you have received all of these parts from the
other schools you are ready to assemble the publications. If these
are printed documents, it will involve physical assemble. If these
are online links, it may require some online work. You can see examples
of these sections in one of the web
publications.
IMPORTANT!
Tell your Circle partners when you will mail the project
section from your school. Students from other locations will be
waiting and watching the mail and it can be very disappointing if
nothing appears. If you let the others know when you mail it, they
will be able to predict when it will arrive.
Teamwork and Success
You and your students are working together in a complex
team which extends across great distances. Sometimes one or more
members of your Circle will not be able to complete their work.
This can provide a valuable learning lesson for your students. What
will they do when they have jobs that depend on the work of others
and a member of the team drops out or is unable to complete their
work? What are the range of possible strategies and the reasons
for selection one strategy over another? What is the group responsibility
for each of the members of the group?
These are not easy questions to answer and the solution
to any problems will have to be decided on a case-by-case assessment.
But remember that how you handle any surprises and or disappointments
can provide a valuable lesson for your students. Throughout the
Learning Circle, all of the student work for all of the projects
is sent to everyone in the Learning Circle. This is so that everyone
will have the opportunity to use information that is sent to a school
that for some reason does not complete their work in the Learning
Circle. But how this is accomplished but in Circle interaction and
in the printed document is a valuable part of the group dynamics.
Teacher Comments...
Here are comments from
teachers about their experiences as publishers.
Phase 5 Checklist
The Phase 5: Organizing the Publication Checklist
will help you see if you are ready for Phase 6: Closing the Learning
Circle.
Copyright © 1997, 2002, Margaret
Riel
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