October 2005 — Features

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The New Student-Teacher Channel

What’s more, it would be untrue to say that every learning experience requires extensive instructor self-disclosure.For instance, it is doubtful that young children need to learn of a teacher’s marital conflict or battle with depression, but with older learners, some educators have found that personal revelations can be quite effective tools to generate a positive learning environment. Gary Goldstein and Victor Benassi, writing in “The Relation Between Teacher Self-Disclosure and Student Classroom Participation,” (Teaching of Psychology, 1994), also found that classroom participation improves with instructor self-disclosure.

Additionally, in “Using Teacher Self-Disclosure as an Instructional Tool” (Communication Teacher, 2004), Jacob Cayanus describes how “positive teacher self-disclosure can result in students viewing the teacher as friendly and warm, which in turn helps create a positive learning environment.” Nevertheless, achieving reciprocity and the positive learning outcomes associated with selfdisclosure is no easy feat; students possess a variety of introverted and cautious personalities that can be extremely difficult to overcome, and an instructor’s attempt to bring students’ views out into the open is often met with resentment. But blogging can potentially aid instructors by creating a unique avenue for open disclosure without the instructor’s direct presence.

Blogging and Learning Outcomes: The Focus Groups
Yet, does blogging actually influence self-disclosure or learning? To find out, a series of focus groups were conducted with collegiate upperclassmen from Christopher Newport University (VA) following eight weeks of blogging by the instructor. The blogging experience and subsequent focus group responses reveal a variety of insightful clues and caveats for successfully employing blogs in your own institution’s or district’s classrooms.

After receiving institutional approval to conduct the focus groups, an appropriate collegiate course of upperclassmen was selected. The students were given the option to participate in the blog or complete another course assignment. The instructor’s weekly reflections of course content and current events were uploaded through readily available blog freeware from Google’s blogspot.com (now www.blogger.com). Fifteen of the 30 students elected to post responses to the instructor’s blog.Over the course of eight weeks, seven blogs were written by the instructor, which generated 73 response posts by the students. Each of the focus groups was conducted by the instructor and composed of approximately three students.

Self-disclosure was the first issue explored in the focus groups, and the students indicated that the blog did provide a distinctive avenue for the type of reciprocal disclosure mentioned above. One student remarked:“I expressed more. …You can even take the comments that people said in class and think about [them] in relation to your own life and then come out with something in the blog. Then, you are kinda [sic] revealing a little bit more yourself.”