HyperDocs: Creating Ownership Through Exploration

HyperDocs are here, and the potential for student exploration and engagement seems bountiful. But hold up—

Before we delve into the potential, what is a HyperDoc?
The short answer is: It's a Google Doc with a variety of links that leads to a number of different tasks. Once students receive this doc, they're free to explore it in any order and any pace of their choosing. But to sum up a HyperDoc as a Google Doc with just a bunch of links would be the equivalent of saying Moby Dick is a book about a whale. To be so reductive is to miss the point.

To see a full HyperDoc Click Here

Going Beyond the Workshop Model
As an ELA teacher, I'm a workshop model kind of guy. Walk into my class at any given moment, and you know what you will see. The first ten minutes? Reading. The next five to ten minutes? Quick Write. Followed by mini-lessons, workshop time and sharing somewhere in-between. It's routine (and never boring).

Often times, I map out my work weeks in advance. I plan out my mini-lessons with quick writes and laps and tasks well in advance. Slowly but surely, I trickle out these plans to students to keep the pace of the class.

But why?

Part of it is to keep everyone on the same page.
Part of it is to keep the focus of an individual class clear.

But what if students chose their pace? What if rather than me trickling out these mini-lessons, students received all access?

The pacing, the work, the creation, and all the in-between would happen at a pace that meets the students needs. It was worth trying.

The incarnation of this idea was introduced by one
of our staff developers @MaryDevane2 and our
Assistant Superintendent of Curriculum &
Instruction @DrAPease. This was the PD book,
The HyperDoc Handbook, they supplied, which
has been an invaluable resource.

So I tried it
And tried it did I ever. Currently, all my classes are engaged in their HyperDoc. English 9's HyperDoc is focused around exploring different literacies, British Literature is focused around the world of the Middle Ages, and American Dream is a smorgasbord of tools to get them to think about their food presentations.

What the HyperDoc does that a Google Doc does not.
Too often in my teaching, I feel that I must teach every idea. If I find a poem I think is important, we must do it. An article? We're going to do it. Once and a while, something will get cut.

But in truth, we (as teachers), like all great writers, must get rid of our little darlings. While creating a unit on Food as a Call to Action, I found seven articles I wanted to do. Before the HyperDoc, my intention was to do all seven of them. We would examine each of the seven, each one demonstrating different craft and different ideas, and we would read it, quick write with it, and then onto the next article. I love each and every article, but were they all essential?


The HyperDoc allowed me to create choice, where choice wasn't previously. All those articles were truncated, some were omitted, and others were given as an option:

Screen shot from my Food as a Call to Action HyperDoc

In fact, choice became a big focus of the HyperDoc. If students were going to be jumping around from doc to doc, they couldn't just be clicking through article after article. I began to think about what students were not only reading, but what they were watching, seeing, and hearing. See my English 9, which was exposed to both Environmental Literacy and Political Literacy in one single option.

Thinking about How Students Submit
What I love about the HyperDoc, is it's moved me out of just writing, writing, writing. In the world of digital literacy, students should respond to tasks not only with pen and paper, but also digitally. Students are now tasked with responding to work (as seen above) on FlipGrid, Padlet, Canva, and a host of other options.

Pacing
And of course, there's the question of pacing. Students do need to move at a pace, but different tasks require different time, and there are, of course, procrastinators, those who need more time and those who move at a clip.

Part of my time working through HyperDocs is learning how to individualize that instruction for each student. Part of it is encourage students to move along. Part of it is making sure there's a culminating task so students are doing the HyperDoc in order to learn to put that knowledge towards a bigger task.

But I also have to think about the construction of the HyperDoc and how students are sharing that information. In each HyperDoc I've include at least two tasks where students are sharing and/or creating with their peers. Take my British Literature where they are learning about medieval professions:

Creating accountability to work and create together has allowed students to understand what pace is appropriate and what pace is not.

The End Result:
In truth, I don't know where we'll end up. I have a couple hypotheses. I do think most students will appreciate the independence. In many ways, my freshmen are more willing to take ownership of their learning. Because they're used to more creative thinking, the HyperDoc feels logical.

In my upper level classes, where students are starting to experience more lecture heavy classes, I am seeing a reluctance to the HyperDoc. There's a sense of, if there's no specific due date, I'll just take this as slow as possible. My goal is to make the HyperDoc feel essential, and I'm not sure if my juniors and seniors are feeling that. I also want learning to happen at a pace that feels authentic and being reductive about due dates is sort of the antithesis of what I'm hoping for. It's still early since our start of it, so attitudes may change as we move forward.

TL;DR
In short, this feels like a revelation. The HyperDoc is getting me to think about not only how I disseminate tasks, but also how students are sharing information. It's also making me think about technology in more thoughtful and powerful ways rather than just the usual hum-drum tools. I find myself revisiting previous tech with more thoughtfulness and deliberation. The HyperDoc experiment is simmering with potential, and I can't wait to see where it brings me next.

Daniel Valentin teaches American Dream, British Literature and English 9 at Horace Greeley High School. He is currently reading Saint X by Alexis Schaitkin and is listening to Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs: Big Questions from Tiny Mortals by Caitlin Doughty. He wants his students to feel empowered through books. Follow him on Twitter @DanielJValentin