Journaling to Build Relationships
Written Dialogues Acquaint Middle School Students and Teachers
Dialogue journals are a fantastic tool for building relationships between middle schoolers and their teachers. Here's how to organize and implement them successfully.
Many adults probably remember starting each day of grade school by writing in a journal. While the free-writing time certainly didn't hurt, looking back, one wonders whether it actually helped. These journals were rarely read by teachers, and short of an occasional read-aloud, students weren't often given the opportunity to share or reflect on what they'd written. If anything, such journals offered teachers a quiet five minutes to get a handle on the day.
The reflective teacher might (correctly!) wonder whether journals have a place in the productive classroom. With a different purpose and format, the answer is an unequivocal yes.
Using Dialogue Journals
Dialogue journals, where teacher and student engage in a written conversation over a period of weeks or months, offer relationship-building opportunities in a low-pressure environment, and provide teachers some important insights into students’ academic needs and strengths. The advantages are many:
- Each student feels a personal connection with the teacher, since his or her needs and thoughts are addressed individually.
- Teachers get a sense of students’ writing abilities outside of a traditional assignment.
- Teachers learn about circumstances in each student’s life that may impact his or her performance at school
- Teachers have a chance to mold their expectations of student work habits
Managing Journals in Middle School
Especially in middle school, when each teacher may have more than a hundred students, this type of journaling definitely represents an investment of time on the part of a teacher. Some suggestions for keeping the entire process running smoothly, while making it as productive as possible:
- Commit to a particular number of exchanges. If students know they’ll be writing back and forth four times, for example, they’ll be more invested in making each entry count. This also gives teachers a chance to phase out the exercise once the school year is in full swing and time is short. Many teachers do offer students the option to continue writing all year, which is meaningful to those (probably few) who take advantage of it.
- Set the parameters ahead of time. Create a simple rubric and grade some samples with students. Make sure the expectations (length, subject matter, etc.) are explicit so everyone knows what to anticipate. Make clear that you will keep the conversations private, unless their safety is at stake.
- Let students personalize their journals. Offer a blank cover page to decorate with drawings, magazine collages, or photographs.
- Assign the journals as out-of-class work. Students can smell a time-filler. Elevating the journals to homework status shows the value placed on them by the teacher.
- Spread the journaling out over a reasonable period of time. It’s not feasible for a teacher to write a meaningful response to every student in one night. Allotting a week (or whatever interval makes sense) between responses allows teachers to respond to a reasonable number of journals each night, and affords students the chance to take their time with their entries.
- Offer students a prompt for each entry to get them going. Start by asking about their families and favorites. Once everyone knows each other, subjects like goals, fears, and triumphs have some context and are more comfortable discussion topics.
- A few specific comments in return validate students’ writing. Writing questions or observations in the margins and asking at least one question in each response help students feel that the teacher has actually digested what they’ve written.
- Look for chances to connect. Teachers should be willing to share glimpses of their own experiences that relate to what students have shared.
There's so much to do--for both teachers and students!--at the beginning of each school year, but if organized well, dialogue journaling will be time well spent by all.
