Entry #4: Thoughts on Journals

One of the first aspects that I want to look at from the reading section on journals, is the aspect of creating personal and dialogue journals with all of your students, not just ENL students even though I think this is a very helpful tool for those particular students. Tompkins says that the personal journal where students, "write entries about events in their own lives" and the dialogue journals where students, "write entries back and forth to the teacher in which they share information about themselves, ask questions, and respond to the teacher's comments" can help students to grow in their writing development and confidence as a writer (Tompkins, 2012, p. 129). I think as teachers, we should always keep an open dialogue between our students, first to get to know our students on a personal level and provide them with a safe space to express their thoughts and feelings to a trusted adult, and second to allow them to practice the craft of writing. I cannot help to think about the movie called, Freedom Writers, where the teacher provides journals for each of her students, and through these journals, she understands her student's difficult backgrounds and gets to know them on a personal level. Through this experience, the students experience a safe space to talk about personal things going on in their lives to a trusted adult. Where the students initially hated writing, as they began to write more, they grew to be more proficient and eventually fell in love with the craft. Though we cannot make our students fall in love with the craft itself, keeping that open dialogue between teacher and student can create a strong bond between two individuals. 

Additionally having students create a Simulated Journal where, "students write entries in simulated journals from the viewpoint of a character or historical viewpoint of a book character or historical personality to deepen their comprehension of the story or the historical period" can be beneficial to their learning as well (Tompkins, 2012, p. 130). Not only can this increase a student's motivation to write and improve their overall writing abilities, but this can provide as a great assessment tool for students to make sure they understood the important pieces in a particular novel or a history unit in class. While it can be an informal writing piece, allowing students to adopt a different perspective of different people can be a fun activity and if possible, it could be a great opportunity to teach students minilessons on characterization and even plot. This goes to show that journal writing does not necessarily have to be about personal experiences all of the time.