The Daybook
For my Student Teaching experience, every student was required to own a daybook, or writer's notebook. The daybook can be anything; in my experience, a composition notebook seems to work the best. In application, the daybook is a physical space for students to breathe: writing, doodling, drawing. It's a place for students to write and take notes, to research and brainstorm, to freewrite and draft. It's also a place where low-stakes writing, writing that isn't graded, happens. The daybook is a place where students can feel free to write without boundaries and limitations, to write badly even. To me, the daybook merges and blends the academic and the personal, providing outlets for both. It provides a space to physically organize thoughts and writing in one location. Finally, the daybook is a place for metacognition, a place to reflect on one's own thinking and writing and learning.
As a part of my classroom, students brought their daybooks with them to class everyday, and the daybook became that place where all information was stored. All handouts I ever distributed were made "daybook-size" and glued into students' daybooks; all notes, reflections, drafts of papers and projects, and other forms of writing were recorded throughout the semester in the daybook as well. Students were also encouraged to glue in anything else they believed pertinent to learning that was happening in this class, from newspaper articles to movie ticket stubs. By the end of the semester, all students had a record with their daybooks of their thinking and their process of learning.
What is in a daybook:
Questions that need to be answered, Fragments of writing, Leads, Titles, Ideas, Notes, Thoughts, Quotations, Song lyrics, Lists, Diagrams, Pictures, Observations, Handouts, Newspaper Clippings
The two daybooks I used during my Student Teaching.
“Breathing In refers to the way the notebook serves as a container for selected insights, lines, images, ideas, dreams, and fragments of talk gathered from the world around you...Breathing Out suggests that the notebook is a fine place from which to take what you have collected and use it to spark your own original writing.”
-From Breathing In, Breathing Out Keeping a Writer’s Notebook by Ralph Fletcher
