Why My Students Now Get Post Approval Before They Publish on Our Class Blog
I was sitting at the kitchen table on a Tuesday night, scrolling through the comments on our class blog. We’d just posted the science fair photo essay, and the kids were proud of it. But the comment section told a different story. “cool pic lol.” “who even cares about volcanoes.” “I can see your house in the background” followed by a string of laughing emojis. One exchange had already spiraled into “you’re so dumb” and “no you are.” At nine o’clock, I closed my laptop and decided we needed a pause button.
The next morning, I told my fourth and fifth graders that we were going to turn on post approval for the blog. Anything they wrote—whether it was a new post or a comment on someone else’s—would land in my queue first. I would read it, and then it would go live. There was also going to be a new step before they hit submit: every comment had to include a flair, a small label that told readers what kind of contribution it was. They’d use one of five tags: question, connection, prediction, observation, or appreciation.
“That’s so confusing,” said Maya, who always had her hand in the air before anyone else even thought of a question.
“You’re checking everything?” Marcus asked. “Even the good comments?”
“Even the good ones,” I said. “Just for a few weeks to see how it goes.”
The first days were messy. The approval queue was a strange mix of the sweet and the thoughtless. Some kids wrote longer, more careful comments because they knew I’d be reading them. Others rushed through the flair part. I saw a comment that was just “wow” labeled as an observation, and another that read “I think the volcano is big” labeled as a prediction. I was tempted to approve those just to keep the peace, but I didn’t. I sent them back with a note: “Which flair fits this best?” and left it at that.
What surprised me was what happened when I rejected a comment and asked for a revision. A few kids pushed back. “But I already did the flair.” I kept my explanation simple: “That’s a prediction, not an observation. Or tell me more about what you observed.” One girl, Emma, had written “That’s cool” on a classmate’s post about their Rube Goldberg machine. I bounced it back. She came to my desk after lunch, a little annoyed.
“What am I supposed to write?” she said.
“You saw the machine in the video. What stuck with you? What did you notice?”
She looked at her hand for a second. “The marble went really fast at the end. I didn’t think it would make it.”
“That’s an observation,” I said. “Or it could be a prediction, because you had thought about it beforehand.”
She wrote it again, this time with a flair labeled observation, and I approved it. I don’t think she ever told me she learned something, but her next comment on a different post came to me fully formed: “I noticed the pulley system used a lot of tape. Maybe that’s why the paper rolled up slowly.” It was labeled observation again, and it was the best comment she’d written all year.
The flair system did something I didn’t anticipate. It didn’t just filter out the noise; it gave the kids a set of training wheels for thinking. When they had to pick a label, they had to ask themselves what kind of thing they were doing. Are I really connecting this to something I know? Is this actually a question? Am I just saying I like it, or am I appreciating something specific? That choice took an extra ten seconds, but ten seconds of pause was enough to stop most of the reflexive “lol” and “wow” comments from ever being written.
I also started using the approval queue to teach revision in a low-stakes way. I didn’t correct spelling or grammar. I only asked for clarification when the idea itself was unclear. If a student wrote “I think the motor is broken,” I would approve it but send a private note asking, “What do you see that makes you think that?”—and then let them decide whether to add it. Some did, some didn’t. The ones who did tended to write better comments the next time, not because I made them, but because they learned that details made their comments feel more like theirs.
For parents and teachers who want to try this, there are a few things that made it work without taking over my evenings. First, tell the kids exactly what will happen and why, but keep the explanation short. Something like: “I’m going to read everything before it goes up for a while. It’s not because I don’t trust you—it’s to help us practice thinking before we share.” Second, choose flair categories that match the kind of thinking you want to encourage. If you’re doing a science unit, add a hypothesis tag. If you’re reading a novel, add theme or character tags. Keep it to four or five—too many choices and kids will spend more time picking a label than writing the comment.
Third, turn your comments around fast. I made a rule for myself: I would approve or send back everything within one school day. If kids submitted something on Monday morning and didn’t see it live until Thursday, they stopped caring. The week that I was out with a sick kid and didn’t touch the queue for three days, the comments dwindled to almost nothing. The momentum matters more than the policy.
Fourth, don’t make approval a punishment. I worried that some kids would just stop commenting altogether. A few did. I didn’t push them. For the ones who kept going, it became just another routine, like putting your name on the top of the paper before you turn it in. And some of them actually started to enjoy the little ping they got when their comment went live. There was a real sense of “my words got published” that the free-for-all never had.
It’s been about a month now, and I’ve turned the approval queue off for new posts because the kids wanted to share their group project reports and standing in the way kept messing with their timeline. I still keep the flair requirement for comments, though, and I still check the queue on Tuesdays and Thursdays when I have a free period. The “cool pic” style comments have mostly disappeared. What I see now is a mix of genuine questions and slightly awkward observations from kids who are learning to say something specific. It’s not polished, and some of them still hate the label drop-down menu.
I’m not sure when I’ll turn off approval entirely. Maybe by spring, maybe never. The online space is still a place where kids practice being people, and they still need a hand with the gates they can’t see yet. The difference is that now they’re starting to check the gates themselves before they post, and that was the whole point.
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