Using Journals Effectively in Classrooms Essay

Writing is a skill that many authors use to show their style or qualities. Writing is such a great experience and it allows you to tell stories, or speak your opinions. It gives you opportunities to speak up and show your worth. There is two important steps for writing, one is to always think positive, and two is always believe in what you have to say. Many people struggle with writing at times and that's because they haven't thought out their ideas all the way or showed their full potential yet. It takes time to become a good writer.

A self-reflective journal is a good way to keep records and reflect upon what happened during a lesson. I plan to, at the end of each day, jot down a few comments about what worked in my lessons, what didn’t work, and how I would modify the lesson to better support my students’ development. As this information will be recorded, I can always come back to it for reference when preparing future lessons. I also plan to often read the information on this journal so I can constantly remind myself of what strategies worked and what strategies didn’t work.

The Learning Journal is a space where you should reflect upon what was learned during the week and how it applies to your daily life and will help you with your life (career) goals.

The journals I have written came from my four years of high school English. Everyday I came to class there would be a topic on the board. I took five minutes each day to write about the given topic. It was brainstorming and giving our input on whatever the topic was. I think

In my opinion, writing journal is one of the most effective way to improve my writing

In chapter 9, Writing Across the Curriculum, the process of reading and writing was investigated and explained in comparison to one another. The reading-writing connection focuses on drawing from students’ prior knowledge and cognitive processes in order to build learning. The authors mentioned that the writing process is a strong tool for exploring and clarifying meaning and the two major instructional components used are writing to learn (WTL) and writing in disciplines (WID). The chapter also focused on the subareas of academic journals and writing disciplines.

Writing makes me feel like I am talking to someone that is always listening. Getting to write down my thoughts is like talking to my future self. For example, I do like writing journal entries because I can go back and read it later in life. Just one short paragraph can explain how I felt at that time and what was going on. It also shows your improvement. Going back and looking at my old writings give me a pretty good idea of how much better I have gotten at

The author saw his students become more engaged. He also felt that his role as an academic discourse “gatekeeper” was lessoned by his enjoyment. The goal was to use Elbow and Fulwiler; which is a technique English instructors use to help students academic levels increase. He picks up Elbow’s idea that journals are a low-risk kind of writing, a safe place within the composition classroom in which students can “cook and grow” their writing. This is emphasized quite a bit in this piece, and this is very important because the study has shown that this simply isn’t the case for many students. A couple of thoughts here: He does seem to teach the journal more

The realization that the journals were simply for communication was what the students needed to write

In this journal, written by Elizabeth Wardle, she discusses the bridge between high school level writing and collegiate writing. Although some students come to college well prepared in their writing ability, others fall short of the expectation and often focus too much on the structural nature of writing, rather than the writing itself. Wardle elaborates on the ideas that high school educators typically desire for the students to focus on the information in said paper, in lieu of discovering a wider variety of techniques and genres. A high school student writes a paper to put his/her thoughts onto one cohesive document. It is a rarity to find one student who writes for the art of writing. Wardle does an excellent job

While working for about two years in an elementary school, I observed how a teacher implemented the journal ritual. However, his ritual was not daily. For example, after a break, the teacher would ask the students to write about what they did during the break. After writing their stories, the teacher would ask for volunteers to share their stories. However, I noticed that not many students were not encouraged to write and even to share. Perhaps the students needed to see their teacher writing more instead of just writing a few sentences. As Calkins explains, teachers need the models of the ritual. In this

Writing is most of the time a dull and exhausting activity that some students tend to avoid when their ideas are not completely precise, and they do not know what they can do because they do not have the appropriate plan. However, in her book, writing your journal article in 12 weeks, Wendy Laura Belcher gives lots of wonderful and practical ideas to make of writing an amusing and pleasant exercise, through many charts that can help the writers to write down their ideas, to schedule the tasks they will pass through, and by means of explanations about the types of articles, concerns (that each person has towards writing), obstacles, structures, evidence and more. The main purpose of this book is to help people to develop writing skills and overcome those barriers that are showed up at the moment of starting to write. Her writing is too persuasive that

However, journaling doesn’t always have to be all self-indulgent. Even though I’ve written about how living with Lyme disease has affected my life, my memoir story about my days as a competitive gymnast and even writing my very own resume; I still had to conform to the writing rules of the class and keep from being self-indulgent while self-examining. It was still always important and required to exercise critical thought, enhanced expression and conscious

Another example of an important journal entry was when Mina would write about being scared of what was happening to Jonathan. To his face and to other people, Mina would present herself as though she wasn’t worried at all about Jonathan being away at Castle Dracula; however, in her journals she wrote her true emotions, which told an opposing story. This gave the reader an insight into what she really thought. In her journal, she couldn’t conceal what she was feeling at the moment, and without knowing her true emotions, the reader might have missed out on valuable points. This could have easily happened had the story been told from a narrative point of view.

I know I will probably have to when I get out of school but I this moment there is no time I can think back to where writing is an everyday occurrence. The only time where I can say I use writing is just for other classes homework other than that there is nothing. I am actually happy about that because I never find anything fun about writing that only good thing about it is when you finally finish. When it comes to writing different pieces of paper it’s like choosing the lesser of two evil. If I would get the chance to choose a paper I would be forced to write I think it would be best to write a research paper. I know the research paper would take more time to get prepared before you start writing, but once you get all the research material writing the paper is the easiest part. When you have the information for the paper you don’t need much creativity to actually write the paper. All you have to do is just slap all of the information onto the paper and just write in transition to get to one part of the paper to the other. My least favorite type of writing to do has to be and autobiography or a personal essay. Even though I feel like it should be the easiest paper to write since you have to talk about yourself, but I always have trouble talking about myself since whatever I say I feel it doesn’t