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Daybooks

• What are they?
• Learning tool
• Research tool
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• Going schoolwide
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Literacy Leads

Principles for daybook success

Here are five principles teachers need to accept about daybooks or writer’s notebooks to unleash their power as a catalyst for creative thinking.

1. Teachers maintain personal daybooks.

To understand and teach the power of daybooks, teachers need to keep daybooks. By working on projects of our own, we understand the struggle and challenges of inventing our own, differentiated daybooks. We can join in the conversation about what works and what needs work with our kids. We use our pages for modeling to share possibilities for the writers we teach.

2. Daybooks are stepping-stones to final, published works.

Hardly anything in the daybook is perfect much less worth grading. In truth, they’re a messy looking jumble of entries. It’s only when the writing is selected to become a final product that it comes out of the daybook and onto the computer or notebook paper. Then students get feedback and make changes before the final, “perfect-as-can-be” product that is due (and is worth grading). Meanwhile, the writer has used the daybook for brainstorming ideas and rough drafts. Or, she wrote her way into an understanding of what she wanted. Meanwhile, her daybook is growing fat.

3. Students create space in the daybook for themselves.

The kids write badly, skip pages, draw, write their novels, write about anything they wouldn’t mind sharing, write at the back, scribble and doodle. Choosing their own projects entices them to fill the pages. Showing off their inventions encourages them to create again. Daybook writing is more practice than end product. When I’m learning something new, I’m pretty ungainly as well. For example, I stumble when learning new software. I have to read a little, play a little, skip to the easy parts, and use that lovely edit-undo button a lot. New writers will, too and they need the pages and time and permission to handle their daybook decisions so they find their writing legs.

4. Playing is a big part of daybooks.

From messing around as children, we got into trouble and had to figure our way out. Mistakes forced us to problem solve. Thinking our way out of trouble taught us to trust our instincts. From play, we gained confidence and wisdom.

The daybook is the perfect place to make those mistakes, get back up, and try again. Daybooks will be messy because rarely is our first idea our best idea. We need to cross out and rethink. From playing, looking from different perspectives, sharing, and revising, writers form workable ideas.

This kind of thinking is ambiguous and disordered and difficult to grade. It’s okay though because the only consequence of running out of pages is being forced to buy a new daybook. However, the consequence of not playing is stifled imaginations. Playing is one way we jump students over the hurdle and move them toward working. Furthermore, we don’t grade the playing. The students, together with their teacher, judge the final products and the process that brought them to the end.

5. Students and teachers talk regularly about what works and what needs work.

It’s all in the language we use: “Has anyone found another way to keep track of pages besides the Table of Contents that’s working for them? Please share!” Asking for input in this way clearly demonstrates that we value students’ ingenuity. Asking students to share how they decided what to write for homework and charting their decisions models for others how to find topics while affirming the child who explained. Asking students what’s hard about keeping daybooks, commiserating along with them, brainstorming solutions, evaluating, and then trying new ideas let’s kids in on a secret: all writers struggle. The daybook slowly becomes theirs, not ours, when we work through the challenges by soliciting solutions from the students.

6. Teachers encourage students to assess their work.

Collecting reflections makes daybooks different. Using daybooks is a part of a rigorous classroom that fosters self-assessment and personal goal setting. The beauty of the daybook is that the child’s thinking and discoveries are recorded for them to look back, reread, reuse, revise, and remember. Rereading daybooks is a perfect “thinkwork/seatwork” assignment worthy of encouragement. When writers examine their initial work, write reflective essays, keep track of assignments, and set goals for the next unit of time, learning grows. Where else do you see day-to-day metacognition but in a daybook?

NEXT: Taking daybooks schoolwide