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Daybooks and Reader Response

"Most of what goes into a notebook defies description. Labeling it, well, stuff, is about as close as you can get. If your notebook is like mine, it will fill up with stuff you can't quite live without."

Ralph Fletcher, Breathing In, Breathing Out: Keeping a Writer's Notebook,
Heinemann, 1996.

Response notebooks, or daybooks, make students feel like the real writers and readers they are. Students, K-college, adopt them enthusiastically. Even our little ones write reflectively, ignoring the lines. (See picture, right.)

I like my daybook. It's my privacy place. It helps me with multiplication. I write them down and they never go away. When you're older you can remember it. It helps you remember what you were thinking about yesterday or soon. It's just pure fun to write in it! (C. D., 4th Grader)

I invite students to try a composition notebook to hold their ideas and their reflections on learning in any subject. I usually provide the first daybook for students who have never tried one and encourage them to experiment. They need something hard-covered so that it can travel back and forth from home to school and stay in good shape. They need a notebook with pages that are difficult to rip out. In fact, I invite the students to leave several pages at the beginning for a Table of Contents and then to number the upper right corner of every page. Numbering the pages reinforces the point that each page is important and should stay in the notebook.

A daybook is a bucket of soil you keep with you. It's a place to collect seeds of knowledge that will bloom over time. In the daybook, students water, weed, and watch their learning grow.

For reading, it is a place to make notes about what you question, the connections you make, and all your work with learning reading strategies. It's a place to make lists so you remember the titles and authors you read, words you learned, and the thinking you're doing. It's a place to record your reflection: What did you learn today? How can you apply what you learned to your literate life?

Students experiment with double entry journals along with other reader-response strategies in their daybooks. When reading challenging texts, writing journal entries slows children down to make sense of the reading. Plus, when students come together to discuss, they share from the thinking they did while preparing. "Trying to write it, helps students understand it. In fact, students probably cannot understand a concept unless they can write it in their own words (Robert Marzano)."

Two-column notes help students break down what they're thinking for themselves and for me. Basically the left side is for note-taking (literal) and the right side is for note-making (making sense of text). Teachers can focus learning by changing the titles of the columns. Plus, the act of writing AND interpreting more likely makes learning permanent. I see that in my classroom and in research: "Double-entry journals take a lot of time but have a huge impact on long-term memory (Again, Marzano)."

Daybooks work for learning in any content area in the same way. Learn, record learning, self-assess, confer, set goals; learn some more, record learning, self-assess, confer and the cycle continues. The beauty of the daybook is that students can look back at their learning and see their progress. Since they recorded initial learning, they're able to build on it. No longer are papers or ideas scattered and lost. The daybook brings organization to the learner's life.

Below I share some of my favorite samples for "thinking about thinking" (metacognition).

Examples of Double Entry Journals or Column Notes

Begin by showing students how to use double entry journals (DEJs). Fold or draw a line to divide the paper in the composition book in half. On one side choose one way to take notes with a focus: looking for facts, details, or quotes, for example. On the other side, "make notes" about thinking: opinions, inferences, themes, or solutions, for example. When just starting out, show students possibilities with the understanding that eventually students CHOOSE headings to suit their purposes.

Some double entries are actually 3 or 4 columns as shown in the illustrations below. Find more examples of double entry journals that work to challenge students in their thinking about each reading strategy in the books Nonfiction Matters and Strategies That Work. Try out DEJs yourself and model, model, model. Put samples of the kind of work you see and value on the overhead (with student permission). Choose other samples to demonstrate how to elaborate. Over time, you will see growth.

I-Learned, I-Will Statements:

1. The strategy I practiced using today is...
2. I will apply this to my reading life...

Another simple way to write to discover thinking is the I-learned statement. Asking students to write what they learned requires students to put their thinking into words. It helps learning go into long-term memory and provides a quick assessment for the teacher.

I've added a second question, the application part. A student of mine calls it the "I-Will" statement. Asking children to reflect on how they will apply learning is a skill that needs practice.

For example, when I taught a lesson on coding, I could tell from reading the reflections that students could explain how to code text, the "I-Learned" part. What they didn't understand was how to apply the strategy to situations where they didn't have text on which to write, the "I-Will" part. By assessing their thinking, I knew re-teaching was in order.

In practice, students wrote on a Time for Kids article with Flair pens. They didn't see the connection between that kind of coding and the reading they're required to do in all subjects. I think they thought they would be marking texts forever! I hoped they would see that instead of writing IN their books, they could stop and think, line by line, in their heads. By reading their I-Learned, I-Will reflections, I knew re-teaching was in order, and then I made time to clear up the confusion.

To mix things up a bit, I teach a variety of reflection strategies. I-Learned, I-Will Statements are my favorite. Writing them takes very little time, but like anything, students get stale writing the same thing over and over. Besides, readers should pick from a repertoire of strategies and apply them to the right situations. With modeling and feedback, eventually kids are savvy enough to choose appropriate strategies.

Consistently writing daily reflections also underscores that learning is not taking place in isolation. With daybooks (or organized reflection of any sort), children know that what we learn today will build on what we learned yesterday and will be linked to what we learn tomorrow. Over time, students come to expect THEY are the ones responsible for discovering what they learned and thinking about how they will apply that learning. Eventually, the students start thinking throughout the lesson about what they will share and say, "I know what I'm going to write in my daybook today!"

Grading the Daybooks and I-Learned Statements

Sometimes when young students are just beginning to articulate their reflection, it helps to work for points. I share my open-ended questions and how I would answer them. I write explicit directions at first. I "think aloud" my response to help students see the difficulty of thinking out loud on paper. I share what makes a "good" reflection: rewording new ideas, seeing connections to other learning, theorizing how new learning works, predicting how new learning might help, sharing how I will remember the new concepts.

Small sheets like the ones drawn here can be designed on the computer and glued in the students' daybooks. Students can use this model to reflect consistently for a period of time. When students demonstrate progress, or when the focus changes, the teacher can change the reflection questions. Best of all, reflection sheets can be differentiated.

I find it helpful to assign at least 2 points to every question I ask. That way, when students write a fully reflective answer, they can be awarded 2 points. If they're half way there, I can give 1 point.

Reflective Example...
7-8 points = A, 6 points = B, 5 points = C, 4 points = D
The most important thing I learned about reading from my work today is...
From our read aloud of Hatchet I learned...
From my reading group or studio work, I am thinking...
A new word I learned today is...which means...

Procedural Example...
8 JOURNAL POINTS TODAY
RECORD answer to today's best question brought up in group.
EVIDENCE to support answer to question - page numbers and paraphrasing or quoting.
SUMMARY for today's chapters written.
VOCABULARY page created in journal for recording new words.

In the beginning, after writing, I ask students to open to the page on which they wrote their self-assessment, and pile their daybooks on a table for me to read. I ask permission for and then share thoughtful models of reflection. In addition, sometimes I share reflections with potential. Most of the time, younger students hit on a good idea but have a hard time explaining it. They use too few words. Again with permission, I show a student's work and together we expand it.

This modeling and sharing has a two-fold effect on my students: (1) They see what's possible and strive to improve, and (2) they try to write reflections worthy to share with their peers. (In high school, I don't mention names!)

During reflection time at the end of our Literacy Block, we play wordless music. As soon as the students hear the music, they close down their work and move to their writing spaces. The smooth tones have a calming effect.

I write along with one student every day. I write what they dictate. I help the child elaborate her thoughts with my questions. Freed from the task of writing, some of my more reluctant students offer insightful ideas for me to record. If possible, I make sure they tell their ideas to the class. I enjoy the give and take of this one-on-one time. Scribing for elementary students helps me assess their thinking process and again, shows them possibilities. It's another example of gradual release of responsibility.

Scoring the Response Journal

In recent years, I've come to favor portfolio assessment. But, when I first started with daybooks, I checked to be sure students were writing in them. I created sheets like the one below on the computer and gave them to students a couple days before the journals were due. Students then checked to see if everything was dated and finished. In this way they were given an opportunity to finish or makeup work due to absences before the journals were turned in. When I graded daybooks, I checked either at the end of a unit, or at mid-quarter and/or at the end of the quarter.

You may have a class that could benefit from this type of structure. Or, for writing about best thinking, see our chapter on the Daybook Defense (Cynthia Urbanski) in Thinking Out Loud on Paper (Heinemann Books, 2008).

Sample Scoring Sheet

Final Reflection...

"It seems like ideas are like gossamer, or mist, fragile as a dream, forgotten as soon as you awake," writes Nikki Grimes in Jazmin's Notebook.

But with a daybook, papers and ideas don't get scattered and lost. The notebook is the basket into which students throw all the pieces of learning gathered all day. Eventually, they weave the pieces into a rich tapestry. The daybook may be the only thread that students pull through their day, connecting all their learning.

It is through the consistent use of daybooks that ideas are discovered and nurtured. With regular thinking, freewriting, drafting, observing, reflecting and collecting both at home and in school, students become more sophisticated, literate thinkers and problem-solvers. Young authors and readers can look back over the pages and see progress.

What I offer on these pages is just a start. The beauty of the daybook is that each one is different and created to accommodate the student's learning style.

Just remember, learning to use a daybook is a long process for you and your students. Every year, my expectations and discoveries change and I love that!