Jennifer Pierce's "Journals: Time Well Spent"

The first journal I ever kept was a small, red, leatherette diary with a key that a girlfriend had given me for a birthday present. I was eight years old, and in Mrs. Gruzynski’s third grade. That journal held my private thoughts, my crushes, my complaints, hopes, dreams, poems, favorite song lyrics, lists and doodles. It was here where I first found my voice as a writer, and where I claimed writing as my personal tool- something that I could use to catalogue my thoughts.

Years later, while teaching fourth grade for the first time, I decided to give my students their own journal. I had them write in it every day, sometimes giving them a prompt, sometimes asking them to write about whatever they wanted, and I would collect and respond to them once a week. I had always kept a journal and thought they would enjoy it too. I hoped I would learn about my students, create a dialogue with them, and inspire them to write for the sake of writing. When the journals came in each week, I would pour over their thoughts, commenting, questioning, cheering, sympathizing, but never grading them. I spent hours reading my students’ journals and responding to them with lengthy, thoughtful entries of my own. If a child didn’t want me to read something they had written, I told them to fold over that page and I would respect their privacy. Journal writing was the favorite time of day for most of my students, and often the fifteen minutes I had allotted would stretch into twenty or thirty as they begged for more time to finish. I continued journaling with my class all that year and the next.

Then things began to change. Our school hired a new superintendent, and part of his regime was to require we turn in our lessons plans for the week before we taught so that he could review the content we were teaching and how much time we spent on each subject. This was in conjunction with our school being put on probation for performing a few points lower on the STAR tests than we had the previous year. Furthermore, we had just lost a big chunk of our prep time and I was feeling overwhelmed by the work I had to take home each night. We had just finished spending months redoing our report cards in an effort to make them more “parent friendly.” As I planned out my year that August, I began to rethink my use of journals. I worried that it was time I couldn’t justify spending- after all I didn’t grade them, they weren’t a “product” that I shared with parents, and I didn’t have a place for them on our report cards. I felt great pressure to spend my time following our recently adopted Language Arts program which didn’t address journals, instead offering workbook pages of mechanics practice and writing prompts tied into the reading selections of the week. There just wasn’t time in my school day for journals and, I admitted to myself, with the challenge of a new Language Arts program, turning in weekly lesson plans, and the pressure to make sure I was teaching towards successful STAR testing, I didn’t have the time to read through and respond to my students’ journals anyway. So I stripped journal writing time from my lesson plans, and as mounting pressures at work began to seep into my home life, I stopped finding the time to journal at home as well. Without realizing it, journal writing had disappeared from my life.

Now it’s a decade later, and I am in the midst of Redwood Writing Project’s Summer Institute. Part of our involvement included researching and responding to a topic we felt was important related to writing. I was pouring over my Writer’s Workshop books trying to decide what I wanted to write this inquiry paper about and, further down the line, what I wanted to present for a workshop. I was overwhelmed by the sheer amount of ideas that poured into my brain. Perhaps I could research how to set up a Writer’s Workshop? Or maybe I would concentrate on just peer editing? Should I think about the teacher conferencing aspect? That led me to think about responding to student writing. Flipping through Adele Fiderer’s Teaching Writing: A Workshop Approach, I discovered her section on student notebooks. I started reading and thought to myself, “Oh yeah! I used to do that!” Then as I read on, I began to wonder, “Now, why did I stop using journals?” and “Could I do this with my third graders?” Finally I thought, “What benefits will this give my students- it’s a big investment of my time, so it better have practical applications and measureable results!” That was when I decided what to write my inquiry about: Why journal writing is an important part of the writing curriculum, and how to use journal writing in the classroom.

I believe, and my experiences have proven to me, that keeping a journal is one of the most enjoyable and liberating forms of writing we can do, and I am excited with the idea of being able to confirm that journal writing is a valuable tool in the classroom. I decided to research journal writing and gather support from teaching professionals to validate using journals to myself, my colleagues, my students, and their families. While researching, I planned to explore the differences between diary keeping versus keeping a journal or notebook. Furthermore, I wanted to explore how much time to give students to write, how often, what to require, whether or not to grade or assess their journal writing, and how to go about getting started. I also wondered if my student journals should be teacher directed, focused through mini-lessons, include word banks, have sections for story starters, and/or require writing to become a finished product.

Why is journal writing an important part of our curriculum? In the many books I used for research, I kept seeing a recurring theme: providing daily writing opportunities for children, beginning in kindergarten, is necessary for the growth and development of their writing. Journals or notebooks are an important form of writing because “expressive writing appeals to the intrapersonal, logical, mathematical and linguistic multiple intelligences. Journals have an unstructured approach that stimulates inventiveness and problem solving.” (Hughey, 2001) In other words, through writing in journals students make sense of the world around them. Journals can be personal sounding boards, allowing writers to examine their thoughts and ideas without feeling the pressure to produce a product. Journals are also a safe place to experiment with style, voice, mechanics and form. Journals can provide a teacher-student connection, giving students a chance to speak out in a risk-free environment. This allows opportunities for greater self-examination, therapeutic qualities such as stress reduction, and a chance to accept input in a comfortable way. Journal writing is also an excellent way to motivate writers: they have control of their topics, which allows them to write for personal and significant reasons.

Journals can provide an excellent source of topics to use within the Writer’s Workshop model, starting out as ideas and then being fleshed out and revised into published pieces. As children’s poet and author Jack Prelutsky wrote, “I save all my idea notebooks. I have at least fifty- and when I’m ready to write another book of poems I start working my way through all the notebooks…” And as if this wasn’t enough to convince you, after looking through the California English-Language Arts Content Standards, one would find justification for journal keeping under writing strategies, organization, focus, evaluation, applications and genre. In the multitude of research I encountered, study after study, teacher after teacher, the results of journal keeping were clear: students who use journals are more invested in their writing, are more able to express themselves clearly, develop a stronger voice and better vocabulary, and can experiment with and develop their use of genre, technique, mechanics and style. In short, the measureable results I needed to see were all there; students will grow as writers through journal writing.

One of the most powerful insights I had after researching journal writing is that there is really no wrong way to keep a journal. One distinction that was made for me was the difference between diary keeping and notebook keeping. A diary is usually a brief summary of events with a date. It records facts in bare detail, and is often just a record of the day’s happenings. A journal, on the other hand, is a personal written record of “one person’s feelings, interests, events, descriptions, experiences, memories and reactions.” (Hughey, 2001) Although it too has a date, and may record a day’s events, in a journal writers delve deeper into their thoughts. Student journal writing can also be focused into specific areas depending on the needs of the teacher.

There are a nearly infinite amount of ways to incorporate journal writing into your classroom. Here is a brief summary of some of the most common uses for classroom notebooks:

• Learning journals, sometimes called “learning logs” in which students examine topics they are studying in any area of the curriculum. There are literature response journals, which combine personal written responses with learning outcomes through reading and reacting, evaluating and sharing.

• Dialect journals pose an idea and then give the writer the task of identifying the issue and responding to it.

• Shared journals where the writer writes for a specific purpose and to a predetermined audience; an example would be Lewis and Clark’s trip journal written for the people back home detailing the new sights, sounds, animals, plants and experiences on their journey.

• Paired dialogue journals in which a lower grade student is partnered with an upper grade student, and the journal is a continuing dialogue between the buddies.

• Personal journals where students are given time to write “whatever they want” and may ask questions of the teacher, tell what has happened to them, explore their dreams, thoughts, or ideas, as well as create lists, stories, and poetry.

How can a teacher incorporate journals into her classroom writing time? Journal time can follow a mini-lesson on genre, mechanics, voice or any other aspect of writing as a way to incorporate the learned technique. On the flip side, you can use student journals to help you decide which mini-lessons need to be taught after examining your students’ writing. Sometimes teachers may give writing prompts to focus students before or after a lesson. Journal quick writes are an excellent way to gather prior knowledge before embarking on new subjects. When you are outside of the classroom don’t forget that journals are portable, making them an ideal field trip companion for quick writes, observations, or questions. In all these areas and more, journals can simply be used in their most pure form: to give your students an outlet for creative expression and introspection, a place to “dream, philosophize, imagine, vent, figure things out.” In short, to chronicle your “life’s journey-thus the term journal.” (Woodward, 1996)

No matter how you have your students keep a journal, if you give your students time to write, they will reap all the benefits of writing. The question then becomes, how much time is enough? The old adage that practice makes perfect is certainly true with writing. The more time you give, the better writers your students become. But how should we incorporate journal time into our already busy schedules? An idea that cropped up over and over in my reading was that daily journal writing reaps the most rewards. Setting the time aside daily creates the writing habit and helps students buy-in to the process and come full circle with expression and introspection. However, while establishing a routine is important, the amount of time you dedicate each day can vary greatly. The professional books I read recommended quick writes from as little as two to five minutes a day, all the way up to 30 minute blocks. This is excellent news to teachers who wonder where to squeeze in a daily journal write.

My experience has shown that younger children often need more time- at least ten minutes to get down one or two thoughts, as they are often hindered by their inexperience with writing and their lack of speed. Regardless, even a short period of journal writing each day will provide students with a creative outlet and much needed practice. As students grow as writers they may be able to write several thoughts or answer a prompt in only a few minutes. Of course, depending on how you use journals in your classroom, you will want to modify the time for assignments to meet your needs. If you want a written response to a math question that is stumping the class, a quick two minute explanation may suffice. However, if you want your students to relate an incident in your social studies lesson to their real life experiences, you may need to give them more time to process, plan and execute a meaningful response.

Journal writing can become an integral part of your writing workshop. Teachers use journals to brainstorm, make lists of interesting story starters and topics, create word lists, and answer teacher given prompts. Often teachers find that students who are given the permission to write about anything they want will get inspired by a story or idea and then develop it further during the writer’s workshop. Although journal writing does not need to create a finished product, it is often the nursery for ideas that later hatch into published pieces. As children’s author Lois Lowry points out about journals, “Stories don’t just appear out of nowhere. They need a ball that starts to roll.”

Should we grade our student journals? The short answer from all the sources I encountered was a resounding NO! As pointed out in Writing Through Childhood by Shelley Harwayne, “Journals are a safe place to start writing, without grades but with supportive and interested comments from the teacher…journals serve as a bridge between teacher and student, providing opportunities for mentoring and mutual trust.” Grading isn’t necessary, and in fact may sabotage some of the benefits of keeping a journal. Instead, as Harwayne pointed out, there will be an investment of time from the teacher being the reader/responder. Here is a wonderful side effect of classroom journals- they provide a place to foster relationships between the teacher and her students, providing opportunities to personally respond to a student’s thoughts, questions, and dilemmas.

One year I had a student whose parents were divorcing and she wrote in her journal that she had woken up in the middle of the night because she heard crying. After walking down to the kitchen she found her father in tears. She snuck back to her room before he saw her, but was worried and upset. She wrote, “Mrs. Pierce, what should I do? Should I talk to him? What if he doesn’t want me to know? I just wanted to give him a hug- do you think that would have been okay?” Of course I was able to write back to her with some hints about what she might do. Furthermore it alerted me to her anxiety, and I took steps to make sure she got the support she needed. The journal gave her a safe place to write about a frightening and potentially embarrassing situation- one she might never have shared with me otherwise.

Reading and responding to student journals does take time, but teachers may make up some of that time in other ways. For one thing, as children spend more time observing and writing from their own experiences, developing rich details and thoughtful entries, their published pieces will evolve from writing that needs fewer revisions and drafts. (Harwayne, 2001) If you are uncomfortable, as I was, spending time on assignments that can’t be graded, consider this: journals should be thought of as a testing ground for thought. Teachers can use journals throughout the curriculum to help kids synthesize information before sharing in class discussions, taking exams, or writing critical papers. In writing formal assignments, journals will help students to explore, clarify, modify and extend topics, and these in turn will be graded. The more I read, the more I saw journal writing as a support tool, much like flashcards are in math, and I no longer worried about spending time on something that didn’t receive a grade.

There was one more question- how often should I respond to my students’ journals. Again, I found there was no one right way to do this. Each teacher needs to consider her own schedule, time, and needs. Adele Fiderer recommended the following: “It is a good idea to collect notebooks every three weeks so that you can help your students look for a theme emerging out of their entries.” She goes on to say that if you stagger your students’ turn-in days, you can pace yourself. Some teachers respond directly to students on the journal pages, others prefer using Post-It notes. However you choose to do it, make sure that you comment specifically on what students have written, perhaps writing questions you have, or asking them for clarification. Stay away from value judgements, mechanics pointers, and criticism.

Working with students means that we will inevitably find some bad language, negative comments, inappropriate or worrisome themes. How should we respond to these? The technique I used was to tell students that they should fold over any page(s) that they didn’t want me to read, giving them the freedom to express without fear of repercussions. You may want to tell your class that they can write what they want, but if they wish to share or publish a piece, it must be school appropriate. Another way to handle this, before you begin journal writing with your students, make it clear to them that you are a mandated reporter. Let them know what that entails, and have a discussion about the ramifications this may have in their writing. Teachers must be the ones to set their own boundaries and guidelines while thinking about grade level, comfort level, classroom climate, and expectations. One colleague of mine expressed a concern over liability- what if a student threatens harm to himself or others? Do we have a legal obligation to report this, and can we be held liable? I think of it this way: you are a mandated reporter, but you do not have a patient/doctor confidentiality clause. Your students safety is your number one concern regardless of privacy. Therefore, report anything that is threatening to the writer or others right away to cover comply with the law and keep everyone safe.

One of the most meaningful ways to interest your students in journal writing is to share entries from your own journal. What an empowering example you can be! As I learned during my time in the Redwood Writing Project, teachers need to make writing part of their professional practice in order to be effective teachers of writing. Thinking back to my prior experiences using journals in the classroom, I am proud of myself for giving my students such a valuable tool. I regret stopping, but realize that growth comes through change, and even though ten years have passed, I can easily bring journal writing back into my daily classroom routine. Another important change is that I have brought journals back into my personal life. I purchased a new, blank journal recently and have made the commitment to spend some time each week writing. I plan on keeping a journal at school as well, and to declare daily journal writing time as sacred. I will join my students as they write, and share as they share. A colleague of mine made this brilliant suggestion: keep my classroom journal on my desk and have it available for students to read during free reading time. Keep Post-Ii notes available, and ask them to respond to my writing. What an empowering experience for the students! I can’t wait to try it!

The time to present my findings to my teaching fellows was drawing near. As I was preparing my workshop on journal writing, I decided I should present some evidence, some examples of journal writing. I didn’t have any student samples since I hadn’t had classroom journals for almost a decade. I was dedicated to starting them for this school year, but that still left me with no tangible evidence of notebook keeping. On a whim I searched through my house and found three of my childhood journals. How amazing it was to look back at my thoughts, poems, and stories, told in my own words. Like a time capsule, it brought me back to a different time and place. I had the evidence to share, and possibly the single most compelling reason to journal; you are helping your students create something they will look at again and again, and treasure for a lifetime. If nothing else, you can journal for posterity and, in the future, you will have a record of time well spent.



Fiderer, A. 1993. Teaching Writing: A Workshop Approach. Scholastic Inc. New York, NY.

Fountas, I.& Pinnell, G. 2001. Guiding Readers and Writers Grades 3 – 6. Heinemann. Portsmouth, NH.

Frank, M. 1979. If You’re Trying To Teach Kids To Write… Incentive Publications, Inc. Nashville, TN.

Harwayne, S. 2001. Writing Through Childhood- Rethinking Process and Product. Heinemann. Portsmouth, NH.

Hughey, J. & Slack, C. 2001. Teaching Children To Write- Theory Into Practice. Prentice-Hall Inc. Upper Saddle River, NJ.

LeCount, D. 2002. Nonstandardized Quests. Heinemann. Portsmouth, NH.

National Writing Project & Nagin, C. 2006. Because Writing Matters. Jossey-Bass. San Francisco, CA

Woodward, P. 1996. Journal Jumpstarts. Cottonwood Press, Inc. Fort Collins, CO.

And of course: The California Reading/Language Arts Framework