Thinking Out Loud on Paper: The Student Daybook as a Tool to Foster Learning

Not to be confused with a daily-planner daybook that organizes time, the student daybook helps organize thoughts - across time, across subject areas. It helps learners build lasting connections between reflection and application, in-school content and out-of-school life, even last week's lesson and this week's. In other words, it's not just a place to jot down ideas, but a place where real learning happens. Thinking Out Loud on Paper helps you understand the power of the student daybook and offers ready-to-use lessons to make the most of it. Fostering deeper, more critical thinking, offering a place to process content and new ideas, and reinforcing the importance of students' own thoughts are just some of the many important reasons to implement the daybook. Thinking Out Loud on Paper goes well beyond rationales to provide ready-to-use lessons that help you get started and succeed, including classroom-tested, research-based daybook strategies for:

• helping students get started with daybooks
• organizing for a variety of teaching and learning styles
• sustaining daybooks through meaningful invitations and instruction
• evaluating and assessing student thinking
• using computers as part of your teaching
• conducting teacher research.

 Meanwhile, Theory Connection Boxes, broken out by grade level, connect the theory behind student daybooks directly to effective classroom practices specified in the book, while abundant examples from real daybooks show you what kind of results you and your students can achieve. Teach students that their thoughts matter and that their thinking is as important as their responses. Read Thinking Out Loud on Paper and the advice of the many teachers in it who have raised expectations of how deeply kids can learn. You'll soon see the student daybook is an effective way to support your teaching by giving students a space to consider what they've learned in personal, authentic ways that create new, stronger connections than ever.