If you are asking your students to maintain a writer's notebook to improve their own writing process, then you should be keeping one too!

My history with journals/writer's notebooks: I began with journals in 1991--my first year of teaching. I had taken a methods class at my university that stressed the importance of having students keep journals to record daily ideas for potential writing. I said, "Why not?" and every student writer from day one maintained a spiral-bound "journal" for me. Most tossed their journals in the trash on the last day of class; they could have cared less about the ideas they'd recorded there, and yet I continued to this daily practice for those first few years. To be perfectly honest, journal-keeping was ten minutes of "busy work" that allowed me to take care of attendance and set up the classroom's lesson for the day. It never occurred to me during those early years that my students might care more about their journals if I had one to show them where I recorded daily ideas.

In 1998, thanks to my journalism students' hard work, I won a month-long, summer fellowship from C-SPAN in Washington, D.C., and the first thing they asked me to do upon arrival was to keep a daily journal that documented my experience. Since college, I had not kept my own journal; I asked my students to keep theirs, but I was not doing it alongside them, nor had I ever shown them one of my past journals. Maintaining that C-SPAN daily journal was an eye-opening experience for me. I really went the extra mile as I kept it too; I illustrated my daily entries (with my "Mr. Stick" character that I had recently begun using in class), and added lots of visuals with glue and tape. It's quite fun to look through. So many years later, I have probably re-read each day's entry from that fellowship close to a hundred times, and I am always floored by all the really good thinking I was doing back then. When I returned to my classroom that August, I showed and shared from my summer journal every day during the first month of school. My kids were hooked; they wanted to keep journals too, and they wanted their to be just as visual as mine. Because I could explain my own thinking process based on each page I shared with them, they were so much more willing to put deeper thought into their journals. I was floored at the difference in my students' attitudes about their journals that school year. Only a few threw theirs away that school year; several years later, I would guess that none of my students felt their journals were worth so little that they considered dropping them in the trash. If you click the image from my C-SPAN journal pictured here, you can see it in larger form.

While I slowly learned to enjoy and value the process of keeping a journal that I could share with my students, I also realized that I didn't much care for the traditional feel that comes with a journal. The whole "Dear Diary" feel, the whole "Here's what happened to me today..." expectation began to bother me; I wanted to have a spiral-bound place to record ideas for future writing assignments, but I didn't need the process to feel so traditional. In 2005, I began discovering that people were writing about a new type of journal--a "Writer's Notebook"--which allowed students to be recklessly creative as they explored potential writing ideas from class. The three mentor texts at right remain the best three I have found. In 2006, I began my very first writer's notebook.

These days in class, thanks to the amazing suggestions from Ralph Fletcher and Aimee Buckner, I have become a writer's notebook "junkie." Each class session begins with 10 minutes of SWT--"Sacred Writing Time"-- where students begin recording in whatever way they'd like to record new thoughts on topics they might want to write about; they can also continue working on an idea started during a previous session of SWT. My students slowly learn my routine and understand that my expectation is that they are to be listening and looking for writing topics at all times because they have this guaranteed ten minutes of time as soon as my class begins. Once the practice has been established, they begin walking through the world with a different set of eyes. They observe the world with "writer's eyes." I have baskets in class where students can safely stow their notebooks at the end of each class, but many of my students take theirs home so they can immediately write down new ideas as they come to them. Because I show them mine regularly, and because I take extra care adding color and visuals to my pre-writing, most of them do this too.

I consider our writer's notebooks to be the place where most of our pre-writing is stored. Once a week, on our writer's workshop day, they have time to take one of their ideas from a notebook page through the writing process. Each semester (18 weeks), my students are required to take three or four of their writer's notebook ideas through all steps of the writing process (pre-writing, drafting, response, revision, editing, publishing). Our writer's workshop is the true cornerstone of my project-based classroom, and it all begins by helping students value the keeping of a writer's notebook.

My students are passionate about their writer's notebooks too; I am convinced they care about their notebooks because they see that I keep and care for mine too. My workshop approach to teaching the writing process is totally dependent on the fact that my students explore personal writing ideas daily in a less-structured, more-learning-style-friendly format. I couldn't have my writer's workshop if my students didn't have guaranteed daily time in their writer's notebooks.

If you don't have a writer's notebook you're keeping to show your students, then begin one. Don't hesitate about this; simply, do it. It makes all the difference.

Students need to truly "own" their notebooks, to see them as a storehouse for interesting things they think about as well as a place to develop an independent "style." Over the years, I have discovered many tricks for helping my new students--most of whom have never even heard of a writer's notebooks when they come to me--to become independent topic-seekers and conveyers of style. My students eventually all arrive at a place where their notebooks are completely their own, but they arrive at different times.

Writer's Notebook Bingo Cards: Over the summer of 2011, my wonderful wife--Dena Harrison, who is also a teacher--and I created a really great resource that we are using to help our students understand the unique expectations of a writer's notebook. On the first day of each month, our students receive a new "Writer's Notebook Bingo Card," which has twenty-four topic/thinking suggestions that could inspire a notebook entry during "Sacred Writing Time." We wrote the topics to not only appeal to a wide variety of learning styles but also to encourage students to explore writing topics for the three genres of writing we teach: persuasive, expository, and narrative. My students earn a sticker if they make a "five-in-a-row Bingo" or a "four corners." In truth, I don't really want my students using more than five ideas from the Bingo Card each month; I want them to come in to my class with a personal topic they have independently thought of and are itching to write down. The Bingo Card certainly helps them on days they just don't have a topic, but it also shows a variety of techniques students can make use of so the writing isn't just a bunch of block paragraphs.

The center square of our nine Writer's Notebook Bingo Cards--instead of being a "Free Space" as it would be in a real game of Bingo--is a writer's notebook lesson I do with all of my students. In my classroom, we begin the "center-square lesson" during the first week of the month, and by the end of the month, I expect students to have developed the idea into an interesting, thoughtfully-illustrated demonstration of unique thinking. Now Ralph Fletcher--truly one of my personal heroes--and I would probably butt heads over this idea; in his books about writer's notebooks (all of which are amazing!), he strongly cautions that notebooks should not be used as places where students record teacher-assigned writing. Once a month, however, I have come to believe that it's okay. As I developed the nine different lessons found in the nine different cards' center squares, I tried to make lessons that have my students experiment with a format or creative way of writing that just might inspire future independent entries from the kids.

Dena and I actually sell our Writer's Notebook Bingo Cards from our website's; the money we make from the sales helps us keep both our websites on-line and free-to-use. You can access our September Writer's Notebook Bingo Card below for free, which also gives you access to the "Center Square Lesson" for that month: Alpha-Genres. If you are interested in purchasing the entire set of nine Bingo Cards, please click here for details; when you purchase, you not only receive the cards in PDF (Adobe Acrobat) format, but I'll also send them in Microsoft Word format, giving you the ability to edit the cards. Only purchasers of the whole set gain access to all nine of the "Center Square Lessons" we created.