Journal writing is a great way to incorporate more writing into class, but is it enough to improve student writing skills? I love journal writing for a variety of reasons but mostly because it gets students writing and writing often. We all know the more students write, the better they can develop their skills but who has the time for that much writing when we are already strapped for time…right?!
In my class, journal writing is something we do 2-3 times per week. At the beginning of the period, usually as a warm up activity, I project two different prompts on the screen. (Looking for journal prompt ideas? Click here.) Students can choose between the two or pick their own topic. I allow students to write about anything they’d like during a journal write. I post the prompts mostly for the students who don’t write because “they have nothing to write about,” although, I get some great writing from the prompts from my avid writers.
For years, this is where I left it – journal writing a few times a week. Students were doing a lot of writing. Then someone on my ELA team jokingly compared my journal writing activities to that of a basketball player who practices throwing free throws with the wrong form, telling me they will never improve without proper guidance and training.
At first, I was upset by this comment because students needed to be writing – they can’t improve if they don’t practice. Journal writing provides opportunities for creativity, developing ideas, stamina for writing longer periods of time and much more, but the more I thought about the comment the more I realized there might be some truth to what they were saying and began thinking about how I could use journal writing in a new way.
Could there be more to Journal Writing?
Since I had taught my students to simply write and not worry about the details of writing like sentence structure or conventions, I realized my students had pages and pages of unrevised writing. In general, I don’t have a problem with the unfinished writing, after all, not every piece of writing has to be a polished piece, but I realized that I could use their unfinished pieces as opportunities for students to develop revision skills.
Instead of writing journals simply as a warm up activity and then forgetting about them, I started incorporating the unfinished journal writes into our writing conferences. A few times throughout the grading period, I ask students to pick one of their unfinished writing pieces to revise.
Writing Conferences
It took some restructuring, but I changed my weekly reading conferences into reading/writing conferences and spread out how often I met with students. Instead of meeting every week, I allowed more time for each conference with each student to cover both reading and writing. It was a hard decision because I enjoy meeting with my students every week, but I had to go with quality over quantity.
During our writing conference, students share one writing piece they are most proud of (or simply the one they want to continue working on). We then discuss what they like about the writing and I ask them, “If you were to publish this piece of writing, what is one thing you would want to improve?” Bingo! My student has a writing piece already written and a goal they picked out and are off to revising their work. This gives me more opportunities for individual writing instruction and students get practice revising their work.
Incorporating journal write revisions into our regular conferences does not take away the need for whole class instruction on writing or the need for larger pieces of writing, but it allows me to individualize writing instruction for each student.
Benefits of Revising Journal Writes
First, I want to be clear that I don’t ask students to revise every journal write. Students are still benefiting from having the freedom to just write without getting bogged down with the mechanics of writing, but I have found that choosing one or two journal writes per grading period has increased student’s ability to revise their own work. Here are 4 lessons I’ve learned since adding journal write revisions to our weekly conferences:
- Students are more engaged in the writing conference
- Students are more willing to put in the necessary work for revisions
- Provides an opportunity for individual writing instruction before students write the larger pieces
- Students gain confidence in their writing abilities
Publication Celebrations!
The last step in any writing project is publication! Do you hold Publication Celebrations in your class? If you don’t, I would encourage you to try them out. I love seeing students show off their work with pride!
One thing that changed with our celebrations when I allowed students to include any piece of writing they had revised is that students were more engaged in the celebrations, excited to share their work. They often chose the journal write they had revised over the formal writing piece! The revised journal writes held more value for students, they were invested and therefore proud and willing to share their writing. Students had an authentic audience!
Journal writing remains a prominent part of getting class started, but now journal writes have a purpose beyond a simple warm up. I’d love to know if you use journal writing in your class. Leave a comment below or over on Instagram!
