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Literacy Leads

Taking daybooks schoolwide

After figuring out how to use my own daybook and one with my fifth-grade class, I became a literacy coach in a Title I elementary school. I was brought in to help with writing, at first. Could I take daybooks schoolwide?

I talked with the principal, Dr. Katherine Propst, and explained daybooks. She liked the idea and purchased 500 for the school. Daybooks went on the supply list for 3rd, 4th and fifth graders, also. We called them “writer’s notebooks” then. I gave a daybook as a gift to each 3rd grader. I asked writer-friends of mine to visit the classes and share what they were able to accomplish as a result of recording their ideas systematically. I wanted the children to see what was possible.

Harnessing TV

To further explain daybooks to teachers and students, I started videotaping students explaining how they wrote. I showed the 3 to 4-minute videos on closed-circuit T.V. each Friday morning to a school of 750.

Television worked! Seeing others talk about their daybooks intrigued teachers and students and the younger children with whom I had no daily contact. The second-grade team even approached me and asked me to explain what daybooks were. Several second-grade teachers adopted “sparkly journals.”

The beauty of the daybooks is --- and I think Donald Murray would be proud of this statement --- there is no “one” way to use them. Some teachers call them field journals. Some call them response journals or writer’s notebooks. Some of my teachers ask students to keep several --- one for each subject. Some combine everything into one. Some ask the children to decorate. Some tab the sections. Some don’t. Some grade the daybooks. Some choose pages to grade. And, some ask students to defend the pages that show they’re learning.

Dramatic learning boost

We eventually were named the Title I Distinguished School for North Carolina. I had the joy of taking a judge on a tour of the school now 3 years after I introduced daybooks to our students and teachers. We found children walking the halls with their composition notebooks and eagerly sharing their writing with us. Our halls are walking galleries of posted student work. In most classrooms, we found an author’s chair where students shared their work and listened to their classmates’ critiques. An Author Wall of Fame bulletin board is in the front lobby. Every year we boast a state winner or two in the state Young Author’s Contest. It was obvious that we emphasize writing and writing to learn at our school through daily instruction, our Friday “Literacy Broadcast: Where Kids Teach Kids to Write,” contests and a yearly evening coffeehouse for authors and their parents in November. Within 3 years, we had gone from a school that needs help with writing to a nationally recognized one.

Daybooks start with the teacher

Our greatest advice is to start. Start with yourself. Begin writing and figuring out what you want to write and how you write. How does a daybook fit into your literary life? Then, share your ideas with your class. Test your theories about what will work with them. Engage them in the study. Ask them to talk about and write about what’s working and what needs work. If daybooks improve writing in your classroom, step out and share with your grade level or department. Then maybe go schoolwide by showing students on closed-circuit television teaching one other.

Set a small goal. Meet it. Set the next. You may be pleasantly surprised by the ownership students feel and the enthusiasm for writing they display months later in your daybook project. You should witness that both of you relax --- you because you don’t have to read and grade everything for students to become better writers, and your students because they won’t have you constantly looking over their shoulders. You both will have the freedom to explore and then display your best which is a much more natural way of learning any new process.

NEXT: What students say about daybooks