How to do a classroom Journal Benefits and negative effects
Classroom Journals
Mr. / Girgis
Definition:
Journal is an incredibly flexible instructional tool, useful
across the entire curriculum. While often used as a class startup
activity, it is used primarily to give students an opportunity to
speculate on paper, confident that their ideas, observations, emotions, and writing will be accepted without criticism.
Writing to learn:
Journal
writing is an incredibly flexible instructional tool, useful
across the entire curriculum. While often used as a class startup
activity, it is used primarily to give students an opportunity to
speculate on paper, confident that their ideas, observations, emotions,
and writing will be accepted without criticism.
Writing to learn is
based on the assumption that students’ thoughts and understanding can
grow and clarify through the process of writing. And growth in thought
and understanding can certainly happen in the foreign language
classroom.
How to do a classroom Journal:
1.
Ask students to buy a notebook they can easily carry around with them.
Inspiration for a journal entry might come to them at any time, and they
are more likely towrite in their journal outside of class if the
journal is easy for them to carry around wherever they go.
2. The
language of the journal could be English, but it could also be their
first language (L1). Or it could be a mixture of both. For advanced
students, it makes sense to have them use the target language.
For
beginners, a journal in their native language might be a place where
they can express their feelings without having to worry about remembering difficult grammar or vocabulary.
3. Collect and read
the journals on a regular basis—but do not correct. If you feel you
should respond, then write about something you liked.
Remember that “in
a language class,in the end, everything boils down to the same
question: Can you use language in ways that allow you to
convey whatever
your thoughts are?
… Can you express something about yourself, your
ideas, your
curiosities, and questions?”
4. Ask
students to leave
a blank page between entries for room to
comment later. Class time
could be devoted to having students
read and reread entries and respond
to what they have written.
In my experience, students really enjoy
having a chance to
comment on their own growth and development in the
journal.
5. Encourage students to write about a wide variety of
topics, but the topics should always, at least in some way, connect with
the class.
In his book, Engaging Ideas, John Bean suggests that one way
to
begin class is to ask students to discuss a question that they wrote
about the night before in their journals. Such a question might be
“What confused you about today’s reading or class?”
6. Keep a
journal along with your students. Ask your students to write during
class time, and write along with them. Writing with your
students tells
them that the teacher takes the idea of journals seriously, and so
should they.
Keeping a journal along with your students also helps you
see how much time is needed to complete a task, helps you be more
reasonable with what you expect, and gives you a clue as
to how
interesting the prompts are that you give to your students.
7.
Look for ways to use the journal during class time. Even if you can find
only five minutes per week of class time, that time could be used for
journal writing.
Look for ways to connect the journal with what you
consider important in the class. In the final section of this paper, I
suggest specific journal writing activities.
The negative effects:
Use of journals does have two possible downsides,including:
1. The potential for the teacher to hurt students' feelings with criticism.
Remedy: Offer constructive criticism rather than a critique.
2. The loss of instructional time needed to teach course material.
The benefits:
Sort out experiences, solve problems and consider
varying perspectives.
Examine relationships with others and the world.
Reflect on personal values, goals, and ideals.
Summarize ideas, experience, and opinions
before and after instruction.
Witness his academic and personal growth
by reading past entries.
Remedy:
Instructional time can be conserved by simply limiting journal writing
to five or ten minutes a period.
Another approach to conserving time, however, is to assign journal topics relating to the instructional topic of the day.
For example, you could ask students
to write a definition of a concept at the beginning of the period and at
the end of the period to describe
how their concept had changed.
Journals Topics:
Find over a hundred journal topics in these four lists:
1-Self Understanding
and Clarifying Thoughts and Positions Topics
dealing with various
aspects of "who I am, why I'm that way, what I
value, and what I
believe."
2-Interpersonal Relationships Topics
dealing with "what I want in a
friend, who are my friends, what I
expect of friends, and how I relate
to family members, teachers, and
other significant people in my life."
3-Speculation and viewing from a different perspective:
Topics
causing the writer to predict or see things from an unusual
perspective. These may be highly creative such as "describe the
events
of yesterday from the perspective of your hair."
4-Academic
Journal Topics for the Beginning,Middle and End of a
Lesson. Generic
starters in this list should make writing journal
topics a cinch.
Conclusion:
Students
certainly could keep electronic journals in the form of
a blog or a
wiki, or through email. However, paper-based
notebooks offer a number of
attractive features.
A paper journal does not require electricity or an
Internet
connection.
A paper journal is lighter and more portable than
most computers.
And while paper journals can be destroyed in rain or
fire, people
never lose an entry due to a computer virus or hard drive
failure.
Paper-based journals also offer an additional advantage:
they bring mind and body closer together.
Certainly
journals will not work for everyone,but, for many
students and
teachers, journals offer an opportunity to find
