The Third Week—Fresh Ideas, New Revelations

This week, I made some amazing discoveries with using the Reading Response journals.  Last week, I introduced the Self-Assessment reflection assignment to my students, and had a few important “ahas” with it.  One student whom I’ve had a tough time getting to write more than a sentence or two in his reflection circled that he thought he “always included his wondering about the text”.  I questioned him on this rating, because I had never seen him write anything close to a wondering.  His response to me was “But I’m always wondering about the text—I just don’t write it down”.   I was able to explain to him that I wanted him to begin writing those ideas down—AHA!  He seemed to understand the next step for him in these journal entries. Yesss!

Here's what one of the self-reflections looked like:

The next amazing revelation was from my principal.  I had an observation from my principal last week, and we had a discussion about the kind of ways that I have been using the Reading Response Journals.  She asked me how I’ve been assessing them, since assessment is one of my professional improvement goals.  I explained that I have been asking students questions and then giving them a grade for about 1-2 entries a week.  It used to look like this:

My principal explained to me that there is a lot of research saying that giving students a chance to revise their work can greatly improve learning.  She also recommended that I avoid giving grades on individual journal entries, since this can tell a student that the work is “done”, and hamper any revisions they may make.  Here's how my comments look now:

I tried this idea once last week, and I have so far been really pleased!  I have been able to see my students revise their thinking and I feel like I’m able to dig in deeper into their brains.  I love it!  I’m excited to get back into the classroom (I’ve been out sick for almost a week… L) and try this again.  I shared this idea with a colleague since I was SO excited about it, and I discovered that she’s been doing this exact same thing for two years—I wish I had talked to her about this years ago!

So, off to the next week of learning!  I feel like these Reading Response Journals are becoming something that is exciting instead of something that is a chore-- I feel much better about them already!

The Second Week-- New Expectations, Continued Success

This week has been another great experience in learning how to use Reading Response notebooks more effectively.  I have been doing some more research about how other teachers use these notebooks—a little bit of Pinterest and other Internet research, which yielded some great results!  I saw that many other teachers provide their learners with note-taking sheets and anchor charts that students can tape into their journals to help them access reading strategies more easily.  This inspired me to write up a small list of expository text features to hand to students for their notebooks, which is the reading unit we’re currently on. 

I also created a checklist/rubric that I’m going to have my students fill out every few weeks about their reading response journals—I want to give them some tools to be reflective about their writing.  I made it a checklist modeled after the Lucy Calkins checklists for writing, which we have already introduced in class and become familiar with.  I am hoping to give my students these checklists by the end of the week and see how they are grading themselves.

Here's the checklist: 

Reading Response Self-Reflection

Look over your Reading Response notebook, and circle which answer BEST describes MOST of the entries.  Be honest with yourself!

I always attempt to include deeper thinking in my entry.

Yes!          Starting To        Not Yet

I make connections, draw inferences, and ask questions about the text in almost all of my entries

  

Yes!          Starting To        Not Yet

I frequently wonder about what will happen next in the story or to the characters

Yes!          Starting To        Not Yet

I provide evidence from the book to help support my thinking

Yes!          Starting To        Not Yet

I do more than just summarize the story

 Yes!          Starting To        Not Yet

I write at least 6-8 sentences every time I write an entry

 Yes!          Starting To        Not Yet

I have handled the grading problem in a different way than I thought I would.  I want each student to get feedback on at least one entry a week, but I have several students who would like to have more feedback than this.  I have taken to asking students to put their notebooks on the back table of the classroom if they want to have them be graded, and then also having students put them back there each Friday if they have not been graded yet for the week.  This makes it so that I have a smaller number of notebooks to grade each night, as only about 5-8 students want to be graded each day, and most students so far seem to want to be graded.

I’m also noticing that many students are starting to write quite a bit more—many are writing about a page in their journals each day.  My goal for the next week is to help my students begin to include reflection and reaction more frequently and consistently in their journals, since that is the most important thing I am looking for.  Hopefully the checklist will help make my expectations more clear for students and they can begin to respond more thoughtfully.

My First Week -- Beginner's Luck

9/23/13

Today I graded the first set of reading response journal entries, and I have to say that I am SO pleased with the results already.  I remember that last year I was always so frustrated at a variety of things about these notebooks, and I never felt like I used them well.  This year I have changed around a few things in my schedule and I think that has made a huge impact.  First, I gave our reading block time about 15 minutes extra, and I have shortened up our reading focus lesson.  This allows for about 20 extra minutes of reading time every day, which  about doubles the amount of independent reading time that we had last year—that’s huge!  This means that my students have about 40 minutes every day for our independent reading block time.  Students are able to read independently for the first thirty minutes, and then write in their journals for the rest of the time.  Giving students at least ten minutes to write in their journals has made a really huge difference as well.  I notice that the entries are quite a bit longer than last year’s—they’re typically about half a page or more.  I also notice that since I don’t always feel like I’m rushing the independent reading time, I am more consistent about giving the class time to write in their journals at least three times a week.  Last year I was hesitant to give up independent reading time (since we only had about 20-30 minutes a day), and so I only had students write in their journals 1-2 times a week.

One thing that I am looking forward to seeing a change in is the way that students respond and reflect.  Right now, the students are very good at writing a summary of what they read and introducing the characters.  What I would like to see is students writing a summary, but then also responding to what they are reading.   I would love to see students asking questions like “Why is this character behaving like that?” or “I wonder what will happen next?” or even offering their own opinion about what a character is doing.  My hope is that I can provide enough questions and notes in my grading that most students will be pointed in the right direction.

Another thing that I found challenging last year was grading the notebooks.  I got hung up on documenting each entry by taking a photo of it for Evernote, and this made the grading process take about an hour instead of twenty minutes.  Although I do want to find a way to keep track of some of their progress electronically, I can see that my system from last year was not a good way to keep me motivated to do the grading.  My goal for this year is to grade at least one entry for each student per week—I think that will be manageable.  I’m hoping that by providing each student with a good deal of feedback, they’ll stay on track and be able to write the kinds of entries I’m hoping they’ll write.