Breaking the Fourth Wall – with real purpose…

Posted by Peter Ford in Mulling over...Jan 19th, 2011 | one response

The fourth wall is a hypothetical barrier between actors and audience. This barrier is broken when an actor interacts with the audience through an aside.

There were three rules in my classroom in 2001:

• Mr Ford must have fun!
• You (the children) must have fun!
• We need to get learning done!

The pupils owned this mantra and we used it as the basis for evaluating and improving our daily experiences in school. They often reminded me when I broke the rules. We generally enjoyed a convivial atmosphere and even the mundane drudgery of spelling tests and multiplication tables or my uncreative SATs revision techniques, would not dampen the general zest for learning. My ‘smile loads before Christmas’ approach had paid dividends in building a class community that had fun and generally did the business of learning – often despite my teaching.

Parents were offered limited and occasional insight into the exciting and sometimes mundane world of Year Six through homework tasks and diaries, assemblies, exhibition weeks, open days, open-door policies and access to beautifully double-mounted displays of the highest quality that nobody really looked at in any great detail.

When I fell into the ease of blogging – via an email suggestion from a parent and after weeks of unsuccessfully trying to code a website by hand – I realised that a blog could open the ‘window’ into class life wider for parents and extend our three class rules beyond the school day and beyond the classroom walls. If successful, I knew that combination would be good for learning.

My first post on the class blog set out the core purpose and direction of the blog. It aimed to be a dynamic, collaborative, informative  and two-way. That is what the fun and learning would be with our blog or it would be a short-lived endeavour.

Parents were to be a key target audience for the class blog. My first post and subsequent early bland entries reflect this desire to engage parents with the blogs. I worked hard both on- and offline to develop this parental audience – the subject of a later post. However, the core audience and motivation for my writing was always the children themselves. They initially motivated me and I never lost sight of this right thought to my final post a few years later.

The gap between the lofty goals of the initial vision and the reality of trying to build towards them was not magically bridged by the free blog software. It had to built, step by step. The post ‘A menu for Robbie Williams’ provides a painfully embarrassing snapshot of the class blog after few weeks. The Robbie Williams menu task, complete with a hyperlink to further reading was a tiny step to engage my budding pupil-stars on the blogging stage. It is combined with a quick aside to the parental audience about school places in Year Seven. It may be breaking the fourth wall but it is hardly the West End or Broadway!

The early stages were less about attracting a wide external audience and much more about modelling a blogging skill or writing process and encouraging the pupils to do the same in their own time without pressure. Therefore, Ryan posting a useful link to the site was a mini-milestone, as was Minkyu adding his account of the Pompeii disaster. It also allowed me to model the editorial process of choosing and attributing links, comments and content to promote on the homepage. The pupils would need these skills in abundance if they were to take on real responsibility for the blog in the future.

With the emergence of Twitter, PLN’s and an increasingly mobilised audience of eager educators, it is possible, indeed likely, that a class blog will launch to an audience fanfare and flurry of comments. Children can have their sense of audience heightened and ‘delivered’ to them with an immediacy  that I could only have dreamt of for my class of 2001. New sites look fabulous as well from the outset with a range of wonderful multimedia ‘bells and whistles.’

However, these developments are no substitute for actually building your community of learners online – for actually showing the mechanics of ‘breaking the fourth wall’ for themselves. Exposing them to an external audience is nowhere near as important as equipping them to be able to generate and manage their own – or to find innate pleasure in learning when the seats behind the ‘fourth wall’ are empty.

Considering the real purpose of a class blog is a foundational first step in ensuring that any drive for audience ratings remains the servant, rather than the master of a class blog’s destiny.

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Tomorrow: Building a class blogging community through a pedagogy of nudges…