Student Journals: Easy and Effective

This Idea Will Have Students Writing in No Time

                When one of the moms in my co-op suggested that I require students to keep a journal this year, I was a little hesitant.  I remembered my own experience with journal writing in high school.  It was in a creative writing class, where we were supposed to make regular entries in a journal that was collected several times throughout the semester.  The guidelines were vague—no set number of entries, choose your own topics.  I think the freedom was supposed to inspire creativity, but for me it had the opposite effect. 

It resulted in paralysis, with me barely writing anything until a few days before the dreaded due date.  Then, in a frenzied panic, I would scribble furiously whatever random thoughts came to mind.  Stream-of-consciousness, after all, is a form of creativity!  At least that’s how I justified the awful prose and ridiculous verse that comprised these entries.  I’m sure my teacher wasn’t fooled for one minute by various colors of ink I used or my attempts to modify my handwriting from entry to entry so they looked like they’d been written on different days instead of in one midnight rush.  So my own experience with journal writing, to say the least, was not very successful!

                However, since then, I’ve discovered that it is possible for journal writing to be an extremely effective tool, especially for students who struggle with writing.  BUT it has to be set up with clear boundaries and guidelines.  Journals can be powerful tools—they provide students with the opportunity to practice writing frequently in a low-pressure environment.  And as we all know, practice leads to improvement.

Journal writing in my classroom

                So let me share with you how I implemented journal writing in my class this year.  I’ll give you the rundown on what worked really well, and I’ll also fill you in on what went wrong, and what I’ll do differently next time.

                Let me start by describing my class to you.  I have five students, ranging in age from 5^th to 9^th grade.  (Two of these are my own kids.)  We meet once a week for 45 minutes.  The rest of the time, students are working independently to complete the assignments that are due in class. 

                At the beginning of the school year, I established these requirements for journals:

• A separate notebook for the sole purpose of journaling
• 2 entries per week
• Minimum of 100 words per entry (but no maximum length)
• A date and title for each entry

I then informed the class that I would be checking their journals for completion each week, although not actually reading the entries.

Finally, I told them that they could write about whatever they wanted to, OR they could choose one of the prompts from the list I handed them and write about that.  This was my way of addressing the real difficulty of not knowing what to write about, which always comes up and is a legitimate concern. 

The list of prompts I gave them was compiled from the huge list I found on a website called Journal Buddies.  This is a great resource that has thousands of prompts for all different ages.  I culled through the lists I found there and selected the prompts I thought were suitable for my group.  There were about 60 different prompts on the list I handed them, which I decided was more than enough to get them started.  We read through the list together so they could get a sense of the possibilities.  Overall, students were positive about the prospect of keeping a journal and seemed confident that they would be able to complete the task. 

                When the next class meeting rolled around, the first thing I did was have students pull out their journals, and then I dutifully went around and checked to see that everyone had two entries which met the requirements.  I did have to warn at least one student that showing up with an incomplete journal was unacceptable.  That was the last time for a while that people came to class unprepared.  However, as the year wore on and I became less vigilant about checking for entries, some students started skipping the assignment occasionally. 

                After I checked to make sure journal entries were complete, I asked for volunteers to read one of their entries.  I was pleasantly surprised that almost everyone wanted to share, and some students even wanted to read both of their entries.  The class also enjoyed listening to one other.  If someone didn’t volunteer to read, I asked them to give me a one-sentence summary of their topics.  For example, a student might say, I wrote about my dog and the fight I had with my brother. 

                This enthusiasm for sharing entries lasted about a month, and then gradually people stopped volunteering.  When I asked why they didn’t want to share, students said they couldn’t think of anything very good to write about. 

                But what about all those prompts I gave you, I asked beseechingly.  The answer I usually got was something along the lines of I didn’t like any of those prompts or those prompts weren’t very good.  For a while, I was willing to blame their lack of inspiration on the poor prompts too.

                But when I finally got around to re-examining the prompts, I realized that there was nothing wrong with them.  In fact, they were great prompts.  The real problem, I concluded after mulling it over a while, was that I had given students too many prompts from which to choose.  Most students were unwilling to read through a long list of prompts to figure out what they wanted to write about.  My son, Aaron, for example, who has a policy of not reading even one extra word that he doesn’t have to, of course was not going to read through this mega-long list.  So he was paralyzed right from the start.  And even the students who were willing to read the list found themselves crippled by too many choices.  The problem of what to write about had not been solved after all.

                So one week after a particularly lackluster showing of journal entries, I announced to the class that I was assigning the topics for the next week.  I picked two prompts from the list that I thought would be inspirational.  I was not disappointed.  The following week, I had plenty of volunteers wanting to share their entries.  The key had been to limit the options. 

Improving the plan

                Overall, journal writing turned out to be a great idea, and I definitely will be assigning journals again next year, but I do plan to make several changes based on what I learned.  Here are some of the highlights of my new plan:

1. This is a small change, but I will not require titles for entries, but instead have students put the number of the entry alongside the date.  The titles became too burdensome for most students.
2. I think that two entries per week is a good number, so I’m going to stick with that.  Also, setting the minimum length at 100 words per entry seemed to work well.
3. I’m going to do a better job of monitoring my own children so they work on their journals throughout the week rather than doing both entries at the same time the day before class.  Spreading it out will go further in helping them develop a habit of writing, and it is likely to improve the quality of writing as well.  I’m going to suggest that the moms of my other students do the same, if possible.
4. I’m going to stay vigilant about checking journals each week to create more accountability.
5. The biggest change I will make has to do with the journal prompts.  Instead of giving the class a huge list at the beginning of the year, I will give them 3 prompts each week.  One of their entries must be in response to one of the prompts.  The other entry can also be in response to a prompt, or they can write about a topic of their own choosing.  This solves the problem of what to write about plus allows students to generate their own topics if they so desire.  In addition to Journal Buddies, the Daily Teaching Tools website is also a good resource for journal prompts.  It has a robust list of 180 prompts for each day of the school year.

Finally, you may be wondering if it is possible to use this method of journal writing if you have just one student.  Absolutely!  You only need to make a couple of adjustments.  First, I think it is a good policy to check journal entries only for completion rather than reading the entries.  This allows students to write freely without fear of the teacher’s red pen or of their privacy being violated.  At the end of the week, ask your child if she wants to share one or both of her entries.  If so, she can then read the entry to you.  If not, ask her for a sentence summary.  Inform your student that at the end of each month, she will be required to select her favorite entry to read aloud to you.  If she is already sharing her entries regularly, you can skip this.  Otherwise, it is a good way to make sure the student is making sufficient effort to complete the journal assignments.