PLEASE UNDERSTAND AND REMEMBER THAT THIS IS A …
Throughout this year you will be keeping, updating, reviewing, and presenting from a Critical Reading Journal. This handout contains important information that will help you to meet the course expectations related to this journal. Read it carefully, place it in the front or back of your journal notebook, and refer to it often.
▪ The reading journal should be the only place where you keep notes from reading and class discussion of readings (except when you are making marginal notes in your personal copies of books).
▪ You must use double-entry journal format on every single page of this journal. The left side pages and the right side pages have different purposes:
|Left Pages for Self-Assessment Reflections |Right Pages for Reading Responses |
|The left side page is the unique feature of the critical reading |The right side page is where you write your notes and your |
|journal in this class. It is where you will write essays and |responses to reading and discussion questions. You should expect |
|comments that reflect your awareness of your progress in |to take notes during class discussion whenever you attain a new |
|mastering the reading skills which are the focus of this class. |level of understanding about a reading passage. You should always|
|When you correct an error or come to realization about some |correct errors of comprehension in your journal entries when, for|
|limitation in your reading, you should use the left side of the |example, a classmate’s comments in discussion help you to realize|
|journal NOT to write the correction, but to reflect on the |that you were mistaken. |
|reasons for the error—i.e., not using a dictionary, not | |
|re-reading, not collecting details, etc… | |
▪ Why is the double-entry format of your journal important? At least four times during the school year, you will make an oral reflective presentation to me--or to a panel of outside evaluators—in which you use copious examples from your reading journal to tell a (true) story about your progress as a critical reader. You must refer to the list of reading skills (which we compile near the beginning of the year) and you must use examples of reflective entries from your journal to support your reflective presentation. The first quarter presentation will be challenging, but will be short and guided by specific, simple directions. However, for the second and third quarter presentations (assuming you keep excellent journal notes in both columns), you can expect to spend several hours preparing for your presentation by reviewing your journals and other materials and making note-cards.
Remember: This is a CRITICAL reading journal, NOT a personal response journal. The purpose of the journal is to help you develop critical thinking and reading skills so that you can develop and articulate strong, sound, and original readings of texts.
Using reading journals, I hope, will make your reading and learning personal. And as you attend carefully to how you read and to what you personally make of your reading, I believe you will be charmingly surprised to find that such things can improve your enthusiasm for reading and your participation in the classroom. By watching your own reading move from puzzlements, through approximations and misreadings, to more and more satisfying readings you will gradually develop a more realistic sense of what valid and legitimate readings of texts are, and in class discussion more readily share your readings and build on each other’s perceptions instead of worrying about who is right and who is wrong.
INSTRUCTIONS FOR RIGHT HAND PAGES
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• You may use loose-leaf paper in your binder, but you may prefer to use a separate notebook just for this journal.
• It is essential that you complete the required reading and the right-hand side of the journal before class. You will draw on your journal entries regularly in class discussion, and in turn you will work out in your journals new issues that come up in class.
• More formally, I will ask one student, chosen at random, to begin the day’s discussion by a selection from his or her journal on that day’s reading. (HINT: Come to class with a few points marked in your journals. You will need to be prepared to start the discussion.) And from time to time I will ask you to spend the first few minutes of class sharing your journal work in small groups. Then, the rest of the discussion will grow out of your mutual discovery of problem areas or illuminating sections. In these ways you will see how what you do individually in your journals builds into a communal act.
• When reading a full-length book, take notes on a very regular basis and indicate page numbers as you take notes.
• You will also be required to add journal notes in class. You will find that some of your peers have answers to your questions or have noticed something you didn’t. Make your additions on the right-hand sides of the pages. You may wish to use different colors for your own ideas and additions you make after listening to others. We will discuss the ways to organize your additions in class. REMEMBER: The left-hand pages are for a completely different activity.
• Use only the right-hand sides of the pages while you read. Leave the left-hand blank for later. (You may want to reverse this if you are left-handed.)
• When writing in the journal, use full sentences instead of phrases. The demands of the sentence will help you draw out your thoughts fully.
• When writing Right-hand page entries, be explicit about the nature of your change or surprise or puzzlement—state what caused it in the text? The journal will seem less of an intrusion in your reading if you follow the natural rhythms of reading. Sometimes we are carried along by the flow of the story. But the things I’ve asked you to note are all signs that it’s time to pause and reflect. The journal is a device to help you make more of those moments of reflection and to preserve them for later reconsideration.
Conferences: Presenting the Journal
As you know, your work in the journal will count for approximately 25% of your total grade, and your grade on the journal will be determined mainly by how you present it to me in our conferences. At designated points in the course (usually at the end of a quarter) we’ll have individual conferences for ten to twelve minutes (five to seven minutes first quarter). In these conferences, your fundamental task is to demonstrate your growth as a reader. You’ll want to prepare by reviewing the journal, selecting especially significant parts to read to me, summarizing and interpreting your work so as to show me what you made of the text for yourself. Basically, you are guiding a conversation with me. As in any conversation, you should be prepared for my asking you questions and making comments.
Our focus at this critical stage with the journal is not some ideal reading but your own process of making meaning. The conference will allow us to zero in quickly on the major successes you’ve had as well as the problems. What begins in the journal as a kind of personal dialectic through the use of opposing sides of the pages, becomes in conference an actual dialogue. You will come to see the complete continuity between personal work in the journal and public exchange about readings.
We’ll take this process step by step. Initially, you’ll probably have plenty of questions about “what I want”. Gradually, you’ll get more comfortable and confident about what you must do. Real learning begins when you realize that you are your own teacher. My role as your teacher is to help you to teach yourself, not to take the place of your missing personal motivation to learn. The Critical Reading Journal is a way that your
“inner teacher” and I can work together to bring about real learning. The sooner you understand and accept this, the sooner you will become one of the unstoppable few who are able to make and act on free, fully-informed choices about how to live.
(This handout is adapted from Cathy D’Agostino, New Trier HS. She used ideas adapted from Toby Fulwiler, University of Vermont Writing Program Director; Ann Berthoff, Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Boston ; and Gary Lindberg, Professor of English at the University of New Hampshire and the University of Virginia.)[pic]
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What to Put on the Right-Hand Pages:
1. Times when your reading changes:
You see something you didn’t see before.
You recognize a pattern--the images start to overlap, gestures or phrases recur, some details seem associated with each other.
The story suddenly seems to you to be about something different from what you thought.
You discover that you were misreading.
The writer introduces a new context or new perspective.
2. Times when you are surprised or puzzled:
Something just doesn’t fit.
Things don’t make sense--pose explicitly the question or problem that occurs to you.
3. Details that seem important and that make you look again. (Seniors: Remember what Nabokov said about details.)
4. Ways in which the story makes you speculate about real life or a connection to another text or even another academic discipline.
5. Your first impression of the ending--what “ended”?
6. Rhetorical devices that you notice--how do they contribute to your reading of the text?
This list is designed only to get you started. In the beginning, I will also give you specific questions to guide you in the journal. However, once you get comfortable with the process, you’ll find that you will make the list you need.
What to Put on the Left-Hand Pages:
The main purpose of the left-hand page of the journal is to reflect on what you learned about yourself as a reader. Please keep this in mind as you prepare to complete this next step. You ONLY work on this section when we have completely finished with our discussion of the text.
When we finish a story or a full-length text, go back and use the left-hand sides of the pages to comment on your original observations and to make something of them. Is there a pattern to the changes you experienced? Does the ending tie them together? Why did you misread when you did? Then, reflect on yourself as a reader--what do you focus on? What do you care most about? What do you disregard? Where do you have to strain to follow the story sympathetically? What did you miss? What did you get? Finally, as you make these reflections on your reading experience, discuss your emerging sense of how the story works and what it’s about (be careful here: too many people forget this step). Please note the three steps in this process! Occasionally, I will vary the specific description of what to include with different works. That way I can adjust the pattern of observation and the skills I am emphasizing with each work.
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