Hi
there;
Here
is the third of the guest blog posts from our terrific Fall 2015 Faculty
Inquiry Group, a collaboration between college and elementary faculty. This
post is by LCSC's Dr. Holly Tower.
Best,
Rachel
My
interest in reflective journals compliments my own teaching mission. As a
teacher of preservice teachers I conscientiously model what I say and this
learning from “the inside out” helps students determine the value of the
theories and methods I present to them and encourages them to be active in
finding what works for them as teachers.
Enter
brain journals. This is the name I gave to the idea and desire to use
reflective journaling to make the writing in my courses come alive. I had
plenty of opportunities to see what my students learned; they took tests, did
projects and wrote about them, they were observed with students in field based
assignments, but it was harder to see how they learned and what they valued. I
wanted them to experience writing as a way of living, thinking, and being. The
name Brain Journals is twofold in origin: Writing is a gift for your brain, and
Hey, what's in there anyway?
I
toyed with different ways to bring this idea into alignment with my course
objectives, and remained firm in my resolve to bring it into all three of my
courses. As each course was different, it followed that the Brain Journals
would vary between the classes.
Many
of us have our course objectives and outcomes given to us, and I suspect that
most of us come into our own objectives and outcomes, our personal
course mantra. This is the thing we want our students to leave our class
with, that one thing.
It was in
my Teaching of Writing class that I had the most joy with the Brain Journals. A
mantra in this course is that teachers can trust their students to develop as
writers. If you give students the space and support to write about what is
meaningful to them, they will grow as writers, thinkers, and communicators.
This class wrote at the
beginning and end of each meeting. Students were asked to write about whatever
they wanted and suggestions related to the reading were offered as
possibilities if nothing else came to mind. As students experienced writing on
self-selected topics they learned about the power of being writers and the ways
of supporting young writers in this way became a passion for them. Students
came to class each meeting prepared and excited to write. They were bursting
with ideas when they got to class. Their writing was longer than what students
in my other two classes (described below) wrote and they continued topics
across several class periods. I followed my own advice to them and never wrote
on their writing, but each class session included ideas from their own writing
that moved the course content forward.
I
had a chance to see who the deep thinkers were. Students who were giving the
right answers consistently were not always the best learners. Sometimes the
students who did not provide “correct” answers or bring up topics I hoped they
would are sometimes the students who are most immersed in the complexities and
nuances of what they were learning. It was a great delight to see my students
flex their muscles and develop confidence in their skills.
The second
Brain Journal class, The Assessment of Literacy, was focused on literacy
assessment. Students are taught how to administer and interpret various
informal literacy assessments. My course mantra in this class is to train the
students to think like teachers and see each student as a puzzle to be solved.
Each week we meet to discuss what happened in each tutoring session, what
insight this provided into the student’s reading process, and what the next
steps should be.
With
that goal in mind, students were asked to write at the beginning and end of
each class period. Students had a prompt on the board waiting for them each
time they came to class related to the weeks reading and at the end of class
students were asked to write something that they learned in class that day. I
allowed about 15 minutes for both and always included a “whatever you want”
with each prompt. They might not always do the reading or pay attention in
class, but they could always write. I responded to the students in their
journals with a quick note to show them that I had read it and I found them to
be interesting people.
The
responses in this class were predictable but still valuable to me as an
instructor. I always enjoyed reading them. I got a better idea who the skilled
readers were. As a formative assessment they were extremely valuable. I knew,
each class period, who “got it” and what they learned. I also loved the stories
they shared about the students they worked with, their own families, and things
happening in other classes. I got much more individual information about who
these kids were than any time I had taught this course before.
The
third course that I incorporated Brain Journals in Professional Seminar: Issues
in Education, is designed to support students in their first semester of
teaching internship and is focused on issues in education. This semester, I
chose the issue we would study: Writing. Each seminar student was required to
choose a young writer to follow each week and to submit a writing sample of the
young writer’s work with a 1 page brief that described how that piece of
writing provided insight into the young writer.
The
quality of these one pagers varied. Some students were engaged and others less
so, and this was clear in the quality of their insights Many of them were in
classrooms where there was very little writing or time provided to write which
made the collection of samples and reflection on them difficult. Not all of the
students had elected to take a class in the teaching of writing during their
coursework and struggled with the whole idea of letting the writer lead. From
this I learned that I need to pre-assess and perhaps frontload more. This past
semester was the first stab at this structure. I will continue to work on it,
and consider carefully how to allow students the room to write about writing in
ways that are more meaningful to them.
It
was great to be able to share with all three of the groups my process of
discovery while I was purposely looking at my own teaching, trying something
new, and seeing how it worked. They saw that being a reflective teacher was not
just a requirement of the job, it’s a privilege, a gift, and a joy that not
many other professions provide.
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