Jill Schiessl, an English teacher at SciTech High School, Harrisburg, PA is using the cLc with her students to encourage, develop and focus their independent reading.
Jill has created a wiki and given each student their own pages by simply pasting her student list onto the wiki’s front page.
In order to structure the student’s thinking and to scaffold the process Jill has added a template which her students can paste into their own wiki areas. Not only does this map the student’s journey through their independent reading, it also means that all of her students have a common format which supports peer review, peer mentoring and supports comparisson by students.
In order to fully capitalise on the fact that her students are now publishing to an audience within the cLc environment and that in jill’s learning community everyone is viewed as a teacher and everyone is a learner, Jill has begun to model the journey she wants her students to take by ading her own reading to the Wiki. She is going to reposition herself as a student whilst unmistakably leading the learning process. She is also adding herself to the student review schedule so her students can expect to have opportunities to evaluate her work just as she will be evaluating their own.
Finally jill has established routines to ensure that each student gets to evaluate every other student’s work by creating an evaluation / review cycle. She is also going to be making use of the statistics and article history functions within the cLc to view progress over time, to view learning habits of her students and to measure progress against her rubric.
