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!