The students who attend Pen & Paper are predominantly in Year 7 and Year 8 and there are two students who are regular library users, from Year 9 and Year 11, who also attend periodically. What I have found, during the time I have worked in education, is that relationships are important when students are determining how to spend their free time. Students from my classes, possibly after they have assessed whether they engage with the way I approach lessons, are more likely to attend the extra-curricular activities I coordinate. The take up from other grades is much slower.
The students who attend regularly are all in different classes and while many of them are confident in all areas of their studies, it is evident, through being their Communication Skills teacher that the confidence in Pen & Paper does not always translate into their approach to classwork. Several require support when developing their ideas in the written form but thankfully their motivation is high, and they are not dissuaded from partaking in the activities even when they do not feel confident in all aspects. The group of students who attend face-to-face Pen & Paper were invited to a Google Classroom for the activity. In the online learning space, possibly because we are not engaging in tangential conversations about writing during the meeting, there is more writing being shared. The relative anonymity of the space, I think, also supports this. Students, and rightly so, can be reluctant to share their writing with others before they have developed a mutual respect and trust. I have shared the code to the group with the wider school community but as many students are finding the transition to online learning difficult, I understand that adding another online space, even one that exists as an interest based low pressure environment, may still be overwhelming, and only a few students have joined. For this reason, too, I chose Google classroom, rather than creating another ‘class’ on the schools Learning Management System, Canvas. This avoided adding to the noise of existing timetabled classes in this space.
This reflection will explore the physical learning space Pen & Paper as well as the movement to an online platform and consider ways the space could be more useful, interactive, and engaging for existing members and how to appeal to potential members in the rest of the student body.
