DEVELOPING A LEARNING PLAN
JOURNALS
THE PLAYERS: You
WHERE: You can write in your journal anytime, anywhere.
WHEN: Write in your school journal at least three times a week.
WHY: By writing in your journal, you are telling a story -- your story. But this is different from keeping a personal diary, because you will be sharing your journal entries with your advisor. Your journal is a way of documenting your learning and experiences. It’s also a way to get to know yourself better. You’ll be able to go back and read past entries and see how you’ve changed and grown. Writing about your experiences will help you better understand how all of your learning fits together and makes the big picture of your education and personal growth.
HOW: Sometimes your advisor will give you a topic to write about, and other times you will just write about what you are experiencing, feeling, and thinking.
MATERIALS NEEDED: Your school Journal (your advisor will give you one at the beginning of the year)
PREPARATION
You will write in your journal all year long. Sometimes your advisor will give you thinking points or a specific topic to write about. But most of the time, you will get to write about whatever you want. Your journal entries are a way of exploring what you are learning and experiencing at school, and in life!
Make your journal unique. It’s a reflection of you. Your journal doesn’t have to look like everyone else’s. It is a place to use your creativity and imagination. Go wild!
There are many ways to prepare for writing, and here are some ideas you can use:
• Think about the most interesting thing you have done or learned this week. Describe it. What did you learn from the experience? What was interesting about it?
• Do you like to draw? Include pictures in your journal.
• Do you write poetry, or want to try? Include a poem.
• Summarize what you did that day. What did you do? How did you do it? Where were you? Who was there? What did you enjoy or dislike most about the day? Why?
• Make a word collage! Write down all the words that come to mind when you think of your day or your week.
• What have you been thinking about most lately? Something you heard in the news? Something that happened at school? At your LTI? At home? Something you and your friends have been talking about?
• Talk about some interesting things you are learning from a book you are reading? Is the book causing you to think about a certain issue? Are you learning something new? Write about the style the book is written is. What do you think of the characters? Are they teaching you something?
• Practice writing in a foreign language that you are learning.
• Write about a challenging experience you had. How did you react to the situation? Why? What did you learn about yourself? Will you react differently next time to a similar problem?
• Are you proud of something you’ve learned this week, or of something you’ve done? Describe it.
• If you were going to describe your day as a story, would you make it more descriptive? Write an entry as if it is a story you are telling to someone. How would you describe the characters? What is the plot? What is the conclusion?
• Read some past journal entries. Do you see any patterns or connections? Is there something you keep experiencing or learning more about? Write about what you learn about yourself and your progress by reading those past entries.
• Do you love math? Is there a particular equation or formula that you’ve been thinking about and learning from? How are you using this knowledge in your daily life?
• Are you doing a fun science experiment? Describe it? Is the experiment turning out like you thought it would? What are you learning?
• Is music your passion? Is there a particular song you have been listening to, or performing, that you love? Describe the music through words, or a poem, or a drawing. What does music teach you about yourself?
• There are a million other things to write about. These are just a few to spark your imagination and get you thinking.
TIPS FOR ADVISORS
➢ Until the students get the hang of journal writing, giving thinking points or specific questions/topics to write about will really help. After the student’s are more used to writing, you may want to give one thinking point each week, then let the students free write the rest of the week. There are all kinds of questions/statements you can use as thinking points. You could also just choose a single word, such as family, love, death, happiness, etc., as let the students do a free writing entry about what that word means to them.
➢ Let students come up with a topic for the Advisory to write about. Let them voluntarily share their journal entries during a group activity and talk about the all the different approaches to the topic.
➢ Have some advisory discussions about the reasons for journal writing. Bring in some samples of famous writers and their journal writings. There are also several famous artists who have published journals that are really fascinating, complete with drawings.
➢ Keep your own journal and share some of your entries with your Advisory.
➢ Support the use of art and creativity in the journals.
➢ Give time at the beginning of Advisory for journal writing, then use the writing as a way to lead into a guided discussion about a particular topic.
➢ Assign students to read the memoirs/journals of a famous figure they admire. This gets them thinking about all the different purposes for, and forms, a journal can take.
➢ Set specific days that you will collect journals so students keep up to date with their entries.
ACTION
There are a few basic steps to a good journal entry.
• Put a date at the top of each entry
• Summarize the day’s events, or the activity you are going to describe. This helps the entry to make more sense. Also, when you look back at this entry in the future, the summary will remind you of what was happening in your life that day.
• Describe your experience using lots of details, examples, and perceptions (the way you think about the event, and what you think about the event). Tell the story from your point of view.
• Use your own unique style. Do you like to write lines of verse – like a poem? Do you like to draw sketches or include timelines? Some people like to write in a style called stream of conciousness or free form style; this is where you write everything that is coming into your mind without worrying whether it is logical or tells a story. You may end up with lots of random ideas, but they will all reflect what is going on in your thoughts and life. Other people prefer a more formal style of writing, where all the ideas fit together and tell a logical story.
• Handwrite the entry. Your handwriting makes your journal unique and more personal. Handwriting can also express your mood. Do you use all capital letters? Do you use lots of explanation points? Do you use different styles of writing to describe a mood?
• Proofread. Always reread your entry to fix obvious errors. You don’t need to make your entry formal, like a paper, but it should be readable. After all, your advisor has to be able to understand what you are writing.
• Be honest and reflective. Comment on the experience in an honest way. Share both the positive and the negative things you experience. Reflect on how future similar experiences can be improved.
• Respond to your advisor’s questions and comments from previous entries.
• Describe what you learned or are learning. How did you grow or change from this experience?
• Make time to write in your journal. Go ahead and schedule some time each day. Try to make the entries longer and more in-depth as the year goes on.
The more important thing is to make your journal YOURS! Make it a reflection of you. There is no right or wrong way to write in a journal, so don’t worry about making everything “right” or “perfect.” This is a way to communicate to yourself and to your advisor. Think of it as a conversation on paper.
TIPS FOR ADVISORS
➢ Write back to the students in their journals. Ask them questions about what they wrote and encourage them to probe deeper or give more details. You can include recommendations, arguments to their points, suggestions, nudges, challenges, specific ideas, restatements, etc.
➢ Encourage students by giving positive feedback and writing what you are learning from their writing. Include affirmations, anecdotes, extensions of thought.
➢ Don’t correct what they write, but do comment if you are having trouble understanding what they are writing. If the grammar or handwriting is too hard to read, encourage the student to work to improve these areas.
➢ Have one-on-one sessions with students on ways to improve writing skills and finding the best writing environment at home, school, or elsewhere.
➢ You may want to use the first 5-10 minutes of Advisory for journal writing. This gives a set pattern for students to follow and gets them in the habit of writing.
➢ You may want to give homework assignments in the journals. You can base assignments on something specific that will be useful for that student to write about.
➢ Assign a certain number of entries per week. Three entries is a common standard.
➢ Collect one third of the journals three times a week so that you don’t have them all at once.
➢ Provide an opportunity for students to write but signal to you that they do not want their entry read by you (fold the page over).
➢ Discuss with students up front your boundaries, that while this is a student and advisor conversation, and you will keep their confidence, you are obligated by certain legal strictures to discuss the information in an entry: if there is danger to the student (abuse) or if the student might present a danger to themselves or others. You also may have personal boundaries that you would want to set. Be clear up front, establishing trust with clear boundaries is key. You might use language like,
➢ Remember that what you write is confidential under all
circumstances except if: a. You intend to hurt yourself, b. You
intend to hurt someone else, or c. Someone else is hurting you.
REFLECTION
• Use your journal as a tool for reflection. Go back and read previous entries. Think about how you have changed, or how you have grown. Look for patterns in your reactions; you might learn something new about yourself!
• Save your journals after they are full. When you are in your fourth year, it will be interesting to go back and read the entries from your first year.
• Share journal entries with another student. Respond to each other’s entries. What did you learn about each other? It is interesting to write about the same topic, then share responses and see how you someone else’s ideas compare to yours. How are your thoughts similar? How are your thoughts different?
TIPS FOR ADVISORS
➢ Assign a particular topic, and after writing, have the students trade entries with another student. Give them time to respond to each other. Then let them share what they learned about the other person from reading his/her journal entry. Make sure the Advisory knows beforehand that they will be sharing this entry with other students; otherwise they may feel uncomfortable if they write something very personal.
➢ Have students pick an entry from awhile ago (a month, a year, etc.) where they had a strong emotional response to an experience – positive or negative. Have them reread their entry, then write a reflection about how they would view the same experience now. Would they respond the same way? Has time passing changed their response or feelings about the experience? What did they learn from the experience? Did writing about the experience help them better understand their emotional response?
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