The Daybook Portfolio

One of my favorite assignments is the end-of-semester Daybook Portfolio, which I have adapted from Brannon et al’s Thinking Out Loud on Paper: The Student Daybook as a Tool to Foster Learning. At the beginning of the semester, I give students guidelines for setting up their daybooks. To inspire them to think beyond the idea that this is a “journal,” I tell them stories of students past. One of my favorites is about the student who hated the idea of keeping a daybook, so he filled it with the lyrics from his favorite songs. Then he actually read those lyrics, and had an epiphany: he didn’t agree with the perspectives he was filling his head with. He didn’t, for instance, think all women were bitches and ‘ho’s. He realized that a steady diet of these songs was encouraging him to be someone he didn’t like very much, an angry, unreflective someone who would not, in fact, be a good mentor for high school students. As he started to wean himself off those types of songs, he realized that he mostly listened to them in the company of certain people, so he stepped away from those friendships. His final transformation came when we read the YA novel Ten Cents a Dance, which is about taxi dancers in Chicago during WWII. He got excited to share this book with his grandmother, who had in fact been one of those taxi dancers. By the end of the semester, he was hanging out with her more than with his former friends, and he was closer to becoming the person he wanted to be. Daybooks change lives!

I provide weekly prompts related to the books and articles we are reading, but I don’t check up on whether or not students are keeping up; interestingly, they tell me. Often, students will start a comment in our discussions with, “I wrote about this in my daybook.” Some of the prompts facilitate text-to-life connections, while others ask for responses to the readings themselves. As suggested by Brannon et al, I encourage doodling, collecting things to paste in, making things pretty (or not), etc. At the end of the semester, I ask for copies of seven entries of their choice—significant moments of learning, places where they have revised their thinking about something, anything they are especially proud of, with explanations of why they chose these particular entries. I tell them to think of this as their final exam. I could, I explain, choose seven things we discussed and ask them to write short essays about each in the two hour final exam period. But that goes against my teaching philosophy, which is, in a nutshell, to make them into their own best teachers and learners. I don’t want to test their memory, or their ability to guess what’s in my head, or their ability to produce prose on demand. And too, I’ve decided that timed exams are completely antithetical to what we try to teach them about writing—that it requires brainstorming, incubation, zero-drafting, walking away, coming back, drafting, resting, revising, and editing. So if they don’t test what we teach, how are they effective assessments? (Of course, I explain to them that the context would be completely different if I were teaching, say, anatomy to medical students. In that case, I would really want my students to know exact answers to specific questions, quickly.) Instead, I want them to figure out what matters to them alongside, or even in contradiction to, what matters to me and their peers. So going back through the work they’ve done this semester is an exercise in reflection and metacognition (thinking about their thinking), seeing where they’ve been and how they got there.

What I inevitably find is that we were together in our intellectual and affective journey throughout the semester. That might sound odd, but in this world full of distractions, I often wonder if what I am doing as a teacher at all relates to what they are doing in their heads during our time together; they have so much to process in their daily lives, and most of their millennial brains have not had a whole lot of practice in focused concentration (except for the gamers, of course, but class is nowhere near as engaging or dopamine or adrenaline producing as an immersive gameworld). Also, I’m a performative introvert, so that means sometimes that I am more engaged with my subject than with my students when I teach. I try to read their body language, but that can be pretty unreliable feedback.

The Daybook Portfolios I get, on the other hand, tell me so much more about what they care about, and what they are going to take away from my classes. When they include notes from class, and tell me why that day was important, I use that information to refine my next syllabus. When a lot of students choose an entry that reflects on the same book or article, I know that I will be teaching that novel or critical piece again. But what is most impressive to me is the way they reflect on their own learning in class. They showcase what they’ve learned about themselves as well as the course content. A combination of the age and context of the students—transitioning from adolescence to young adulthood—and the literature itself—powerful books tackling difficult subjects in accessible and emotionally affecting ways—leads to a lot of epiphanies as they use the characters as mirrors and windows to their own and others’ pasts, presents, and possible futures. In the end, I am consistently affirmed that they have had a worthwhile experience, that they have learned content that will stick with them, and that they think differently about themselves, the literature, and others than when they started the semester.