When we developed the Hive, the social and interactive heart of the essaypop platform, we knew we were on to something. The interactivity of the Hive was, of course, by design. We knew that our platform had to include something that provided an opportunity for meaningful connection among teachers, students, and peers, and we knew we needed an environment where substantive and varied feedback from different stakeholders could occur in real-time. Now that essaypop and the Hive have been \u201cout in the wild\u201d for just over a year, we are gratified to report that our collaboration piece is functioning as intended for tens of thousands of teachers and hundreds of thousands of students across the country.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n In designing the Hive, we began with the notion that kids will become more engaged in academic writing if they receive support and feedback from their peers as well as from their teachers, and it turns out our notion was a correct one; students do become much more invested in the process when organic, person-to-person communication exists.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Students we interviewed told us that connecting with peers is compelling, fun, and <\/span>keeps<\/b> them actively writing, even on more difficult papers, for longer periods of time. What\u2019s more, students admit interactions are not just taking place during class, but are continuing after class and even into the evenings. Imagine, kids at night discussing Walt Whitman\u2019s, \u201cWhen I Heard the Learn\u2019d Astronomer\u201d when they could be checking their Tik Tok feed! And this beyond-the-classroom interaction has proven to be taking place regardless of whether the students are in traditional-classroom, hybrid, or distance learning settings.<\/span><\/p>\n Teachers using essaypop and the Hive are reporting that increased student engagement is resulting in more completed papers, better classroom discussions, and an overall higher quality of writing. Ninth-grade ELA teacher, April Henney, from Wisconsin says, \u201cThe engagement level is infectious. This feels like what I had imagined classes would look like when I was getting my credential. They\u2019re talking to each other the way they relate on social media, only they\u2019re talking about literature; they\u2019re talking about rhetoric, and they\u2019re having fun doing it!\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n A fortuitous by-product of the social engagement that happens in the Hive has been a sort of crowdsourcing phenomenon that has significantly lightened the assessment and feedback burden for teachers, especially teachers who have taken the time to show their students how to provide substantive feedback to one another. If the teacher is the only one giving feedback to 100 or more students, kids are lucky to get a single useful comment about their writing, but if those same students are trained and empowered to give feedback to one another, then each student ends up with dozens of comments on a single paper. What we\u2019ve learned is when teachers train their own students to provide commentary and advice in a way that reinforces best practices and is informed by rubric-based criteria, they are able to create\u00a0 \u201cvolunteer armies\u201d of mentors and coaches, recruited from their own ranks.<\/span><\/p>\n And while this crowdsourcing phenomenon\u00a0was not entirely by design, it is something that our product designers are intrigued by, and we’re taking deliberate steps to explore and bolster platform capabilities that are designed to create what we call\u00a0“substantive social”. We recently added one such capability to our popular assessment tool which makes it possible for teachers to allow students to assess one another based on the same rubric elements used by the instructor, and we\u2019re already finding the feature is changing the way students talk to each other in the Hive. They are using the language of the rubrics more often when providing feedback which shows that they are internalizing the criteria in ways they had not previously done. What\u2019s more, it\u2019s happening organically.<\/span><\/p>\n We are also developing a comprehensive series of in-app, feedback starters and sentence stems that allow developing peer coaches to construct academic and rubric-based commentary with ease and looking at ways to gamify and otherwise incentivize these interactions. If we can make peer-to-peer review and mentoring more systematic, engaging, and fun then we can create a crowdsourced feedback machine that will take a ton of pressure off of the teacher.<\/span><\/p>\n Another capability of the Hive that we discovered by getting it out into the real world,\u00a0is the ability for schools and districts to create strong and lasting mentorship relationships between different stakeholders within school and district communities. This is possible via a seemingly innocuous feature we have included even in early versions of essaypop called the <\/span>guest feature<\/b>. This function was designed so that teachers could invite a colleague or a teachers\u2019 assistants into their essays to observe and participate as co-teachers, and it has functioned extremely well in that capacity.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n But what soon began happening was teachers began \u201cpacking their Hives\u201d and inviting other students into their essays to act as mentors to their enrolled students. After all, there is no limit to how many guests can be invited into the Hive. Often these kids were a teacher\u2019s former students, older kids brought in to assist the younger kids. Sometimes it was the librarian who was invited or an administrator or even trusted parents. And we realized through user outreach that this was happening organically across the country. Teachers were using our Hive to build large mentorship networks that were reaching across grade-levels, schools, and districts. Again this wasn’t the original intention of the platform, but it is another way the Hive facilitates meaningful connections.<\/span><\/p>\n We recently conducted a case study at a grade seven through 12\u00a0 span school in the Los Angeles area that used the Hive as a way of connecting its middle school and high school students.<\/span><\/p>\n The school\u2019s seventh-grade\u00a0ELA team team have developed a scope-and-sequence plan for getting their students from basic-paragraph writing, through short-form essay writing, and finally into the mastery of multiple-paragraph papers.<\/span><\/p>\n The school is an International Baccalaureate school, and the high-school students are required to log a significant amount of community service hours in order to satisfy their graduation requirements. One of the prescribed ways to meet this requirement is for older students to assist younger students with their studies. The team determined that they would recruit their former students, now in high school to assist their current seventh graders with their multiple-paragraph essays. After all, who better to provide guidance than students who had already wrestled with the essays and methods used by these teachers.<\/span><\/p>\nIf you are unfamiliar with how the essaypop Hive works, this quick video gives a good overview<\/span><\/a><\/h5>\n
See our engagement study<\/span><\/a><\/h5>\n
Substantive Social<\/b><\/h4>\n
Pushing it Forward \/ Creating Mentorship Communities With the Hive<\/b><\/h4>\n
Learn how the guest feature works<\/b><\/a><\/h5>\n
Case Study<\/b><\/h4>\n