Journal Keeping: How To Use Reflective Writing For Learning, Teaching, Professional Insight And Positive Change

Journal Keeping: How To Use Reflective Writing For Learning, Teaching, Professional Insight And Positive Change

"This is the book I wish that I'd had years ago when I first started experimenting with journals in my classes. I commend it highly, and believe it has the potential to bring journaling into more widespread and effective practice in reflective learning."?Teaching Theology and Religion?"A superb tool for educators who want to be reflective practitioners, and help their students become reflective learners. I hope this fine book will be widely read and used."?Parker J. Palmer, author of The Courage to Teach?Stevens and Cooper offer multiple possibilities for readers to use journaling for personal growth, fostering their own and others? learning, and managing professional life.??Marcia B. Baxter Magolda, Distinguished Professor of Educational Leadership at the Miami University of Ohio?An impressively complete and well organized exploration of the uses of journal writing. It provides rich backing for John Dewey?s key insight, namely that it?s not experience that makes us learn, it?s reflection on experience."?Peter Elbow, author of Writing with PowerThis book presents the potential uses and benefits of journals for personal and professional development?particularly for those in academic life; and demonstrates journals? potential to foster college students? learning, fluency and voice, and creative thinking. The authors present the background so readers can determine whether journals will fit appropriately with their teaching objectives; and offer insights and advice on selecting the format or formats and techniques most appropriate for the reader?s purposes.Review"Most historians consider personal journals as excellent primary sources, but few of my colleagues are familiar with using them as a core component of student assessment. In Journal Keeping: How to Use Reflective Writing for Learning, Teaching, Professional Insight and Positive Change (Stylus, 2009), Dannelle D. Stevens and Joanne E. Cooper lay out the argument that course journals give students not merely a place to put notes, but they also create a space for instructor-directed reflection on learning. Current research makes it clear that taking knowledge and connecting it with one's own experience significantly improves retention of that knowledge.Stevens and Cooper discuss a wide range of possible uses: asking students to write out summaries of the main points of each lecture at its conclusion, writing five-minute reflections after discussions, logging progress on class projects, going back to earlier entries and annotating or updating with new ideas, and so on. They also suggest a number of ways to make journal grading a breeze."--Inside Higher Ed"Journal Keeping is a superb tool for educators who want to be reflective practitioners, and help their students become reflective learners. But it is not a typical 'how-to' text, as the epigraph to Chapter 1 suggests: 'The unexamined life is not worth living.' Elaborating on Socrates, Stevens and Cooper explore the rationale, process and impact of journal keeping on educators and students alike, helping us overcome familiar obstacles; e.g., 'How can you possibly evaluate a student journal?' As one who likes to amend Socrates with the words, 'If you choose to live an unexamined life, please do not take a job that involves other people, ' I hope this fine book will be widely read and used."-- (01/01/2009)"Journal Keeping makes a clear and compellig argument for what the authors call an "underused and sometimes misunderstood" (xv) educational tool... The book makes a theoretically sound, logistically solid, and ultimately persuasive argument for the keeping of journals."-- (04/01/2011)"An impressively complete and well organized exploration of the uses of journal writing. It provides rich backing for John Dewey's key insight, namely that it's not experience that makes us learn, it's reflection on experience."-- (09/01/2008)"As mentioned, this book has lots in it about journaling