TTT#575 Building a Civically Engaged LRNG Playlist with National Writing Project Colleagues
Channel: Paul Allison
Date: 2018-05-02

We invite you to join  +Chris Sloan, +Christina Cantrill, and +Joe Dillon tonight at 7E/6C/5M/4P on an extended  (2-hour) Teachers Teaching Teachers http://edtechtalk.com/ttt  for a work session as we build a playlist for youth this summer. We want to invite them to make an argument and to take action on an important social issue of their own choosing. We are revising a playlist +Dawn Reed created last year "Raise Your Voices." You can check out this playlist, several examples by her students and their badges here: https://www.youthvoices.live/raiseyourvoice/



A group of Youth Voices teachers has been building LRNG playlistshttps://www.lrng.org/about for a year-and-a-half after many years of building similar "missions" to capture online projects for youth. You can see 40 of our playlists here: https://www.youthvoices.live/playlists



Last Month Chris, Christina, Joe, Dawn and I met in Kansas City to begin revising Dawn's "Raise Your Voice" playlist with a national audience of youth in mind. We began to imagine how to make a playlist that would make some of the same invitations to youth to find an area of interest and importance, to write about it, do some research on it, and go public with an argument. 



We are bringing to bear everything we've learned over the past 18 months and we are designing for youth who may not have much support from teachers or mentors and who are not already a part of the Youth Voices community.



We have developed many protocols and guides, and we have adopted three different lists of habits/competencies/traits/standard for our badges. https://goo.gl/kQFUYv



Tonight we want to get real with some of this. 



For example this "Design Guides for playlists, XPs, and badges" 

https://goo.gl/r5HWC9that I put together recently starts with this list of goals that are a challenge to keep in play when designing playlists for youth:



An XP should be: meaningful, fun, have only a few directions, end with a product the youth is proud of, doable in 60-90 minutes.



Similarly, a recently released guide for youth to review "(Re)Think Civics" playlists https://goo.gl/ooRkio asks the young reviewers to consider the following questions:

--Does the playlist cover a topic related to civic engagement?

--Was the information in the playlist useful?

--Are the activities easy to understand? Was the length reasonable?

--Did the playlist unlock an opportunity for future career or college plans?

--Did you enjoy this playlist? Would you recommend it to a friend?



We are also excited to note that the National Writing Project's Working Group for the Civically Engaged Writing Analysis Continuum (CEWAC) led by +Linda Friedrich, https://cewac.nwp.org/about/ has recently gone live with a Website that reminds us of the power of this description of the "Attributes of Civic Writing." We've been adding this language to our Youth Voices LRNG badges for some time. And we've added them to the American Creed NWP badge. https://goo.gl/UDZtVd



Now, we are thinking that we can look more carefully at the "Dimensions" of each of the "Attributes of Civic Writing," and link our invitations to youth in the XPs of a playlist more specifically to one or more of the dimensions. We aren't new to "backwards planning," but perhaps we need a bit of discipline to craft jazzy, engaging, exciting language for youth that is also specific about what will be assessed in their work later on.



No small task and lots of parameters. We will be working through a lot of this tonight, Wednesday,  May 2 on Teachers Teaching Teachers http://edtechtalk.com/ttt. Join us any time between 7-9E/6-8C/5-7M/4-6P Join us!