Learning Journals and Blogging
Today’s meeting centred around the use of learning journals in lessons. This is potentially an extremely powerful tool – students are able to reflect on their learning journey and keep track of their progress towards learning goals.
Hema spoke about her use of this strategy in Art – each student has a separate learning journal in which they write down key feedback and sketch out new ideas. We agreed that this was a very powerful tool, which also promoted independence in the students. It is vital that students take ownership of their own learning, and the process of their learning – journals are an excellent way of encouraging this.
In a connected topic, Jack talked about his recent launch of ‘blogging’ with students. A blog, like this one, is a website that also functions a bit like a journal. Jack has been trialling ‘edublogs’, which is designed for school use. He has set it up so that he can monitor students’ blogs, making sure that nothing inappropriate is posted. He can also manage things like forgotten passwords easily.
In both cases, the idea of giving students opportunity to write about their lives is extremely powerful and very beneficial for the development of literacy skills, as well as encouraging maturity and reflection.
I shared a strategy that I have used before: students only work on the right hand page of their exercise book – they then use the blank left page to reflect on their learning at the end of the lesson. We used to call it the ‘Plenary Page’. Students can draw, doodle, mind map or bullet point anything about the lesson that they had learned. Very simple to implement and very powerful.
Keeping Students on Track
Hema shared with us how she keeps students on track when they are doing project work. She gives all students a detailed timeline of small deadlines to hit, rather than leaving it all to a final deadline. She finds this helps motivate the students and enables the teacher to quickly identify when students are falling behind. You can download a copy of her example here.
