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Some pages in daybooks (writer’s notebooks) are easy to explain. Teachers and students readily understand the note-taking part and the gluing-in-the-handouts part. They willingly experiment with reader response, partner-journal writing, and double-entry journals. Kids keep topic pages and Table of Contents and vocabulary pages. Students fill the pages with writing. Teachers and students get that part, the assignment part.

The part that teachers – and students - seem most confused about is the differentiation piece, the pages in the daybook that are unique to the writer. Teachers share their reluctance for allowing kids private space in their daybooks: determining their personal daybook set up, the order they use the pages, and choosing what to write about. Students complain that they don’t know what to write about; some teachers and students are convinced that teachers must supply the topics.

I guess in time-squeezed schedules we miss the point of thoughtfully laying the foundation for student ownership. However, that’s the crucial key to development as writers and that’s why devoting pages to “unassigned parts” is so important.

Fostering a culture of thinking

This next story might further illustrate the part about daybooks I find so hard to explain. I sat at a restaurant patio one summer evening with a group of teachers. They’d read Thinking Out Loud on Paper, a book six of us with the UNC-Charlotte Writing Project co-authored. The teachers wanted to implement daybooks in their classrooms. They peppered me with questions for two hours. From listening to what they had to say, I realized we defined daybooks differently. They asked questions like, how am I going to make sure the kids number their pages? How do I know the students will go in order? How can I make sure they’re doing the assigned writing in there? How will I grade the notebooks?

While their questions were meaningful, I thought about questions that were missing from the conversation. They weren’t asking about how to foster a culture of thinking or how to help writers who are perfectionists or how to help students find their voices. With each question, I found myself trying to explain how writing in daybooks is unlike school assignments of the past.

Finally, as darkness settled around us, I asked, “What are you writing?” one woman shared that she was writing papers for her master’s degree.

“Then, what would be in her daybook?” I asked the others. Silence. “Probably data to support the main ideas of her papers,” I suggested.

A tool for reflection and learning

I then explained. If she heard relevant facts when watching television, or if she read something in the newspaper or a text, if she overheard someone talking, or if her professor mentioned some pertinent tidbit, she would write these scraps down. Over time, the scraps would form categories. The details would form patterns, generalizations and conclusions. Her paper would take shape. Over time, she would collect what she needed for her classes, not knowing how all the strings would tie together. Knowing that the pieces were important and understanding that some would end up in the final tapestry would make daybook collecting useful and important.

My explanation frustrated one of the teachers. “My mother has cancer and she’s trying to keep a daybook. She hates it. She doesn’t want to read it and remember how bad she felt.”

“A daybook is not a diary; it is a problem-solving, discovery tool,” I responded. “If your mother was keeping a daybook, she would be collecting recipes that make her feel better. She would glue in inspirational articles that she wants to read over and over. She might write down what made her feel better and what made her feel worse. She could record her weight to see if she’s losing or gaining. She’d use writing to try to make sense of what was happening to her or gain some control over the situation. A daybook is different. It is a way of collecting information to help her learn to conquer cancer hopefully or at least feel better.”

Another teacher wanted to write stories for her children. Her family loves telling stories but none were written down. Since she thought she had to write a whole story in one sitting, she hadn’t gotten very far. But what if she wrote a few minutes each day? One year I wrote 2 pages a week and at the end of the year, I had a book. That’s also what a daybook can be used for… to write just a little every day and then turn those little entries into meaningful “somethings” when we have longer blocks of time in which to work.

The conversation on the restaurant patio mirrors the confusion over daybooks that I hear frequently from students and their teachers. What they describe aren’t daybooks at all, but journals or diaries or even seatwork to be gathered by teachers and graded.

Many adults use versions of daybooks

My friends and I did reach an understanding that evening that a daybook is a tool to help students capture their thinking on their way to learning something. Each daybook is different depending on the students’ goals. Even the look, the structure, of each daybook will be different depending on the learning style of the student. Once it is meaningful and purposeful to our kids, confusion about how to keep a daybook will fall away. The students just know what they need to collect. And just like in school, our conversation led me to think and later write six Principles For Daybook Success from the notes I'd taken in my daybook.

The teachers left excited that daybooks aren’t perfect, grade-able books. Best of all, we discussed what they could write in their own daybooks and how important it is for them to also have a project to work on. They left energized by the writing they planned to do.

NEXT: Powerful tool for teacher research, too