Student-Student Interaction in its infancy stage

With the theme of this week being student-student interaction, I found myself generally shifting my school of interest, a k12 school, a little more to the center.  I gave it a little more credit about being "blended" than I had originally after making a phone call.

Originally, the k12 school in MA I looked at, and k12 in general seemed to me to be homeschoolers paradise, mostly asynchronous and self-paced in nature.  However, there is some more f2f time built in and what sounds to me to be an attempt at student-student interaction more in the form of community building.  There are students interacting through k-mail, students posting questions to a real live teacher that would be addressed, thus making it student-student interaction at least indirectly.   Finally, there seemed to be attempts at coordinated field trips and outings.

I call it student-student interaction in its infacy stage, because I still don't quite hear or see evidence of a movement towards true facilitated dialogue or interaction between students.

I have kind of a vision in mind being a math teacher of posted summary questions that students would answer and interact with, or perhaps open-ended problems that students could solve using different strategies and interacting/learning from each other.  I don't quite seeing that done, but perhaps I have not  dug deep enough yet.  

I hope to investigate these ideas with my project, but already think it is easier said than done.




I found myself shifting many