Journal Writing
Journal writing helps students develop important thinking skills. There are the traditional approaches used in the younger years, like imagining a minor character’s point of view or writing a diary entry from the perspective of a protagonist. These formative activities develop critical thinking skills, foster personal engagement, encourage students to take risks, and activate the imagination.
It can also be beneficial to use journal writing to engage with imagined responses to literary works and other forms of media. With this approach, students are asked or assigned an identity that is different from their own. This identity can be based on sex, gender, sexual preference, ethnicity, socio-economic class, region, or nationality, etc. While the student may rely on some identity stereotypes to develop the imagined perspective of the reader/viewer, they are still doing the important work of exercising critical thinking skills to imagine another’s perspective. An individual’s imagination plays a large role in developing abstract thinking skills, and activities like these exercise those important thinking skills.
Process
- Write a prompt, or choice of prompts, that engage students with someone’s perspective who is different from their own (a character, a reader with a different identity, etc.). The teacher might ask the students choose an identity, or they might assign a range of identities.
- Give students 10 minutes to respond to the prompt.
- Instruct students to meet in pairs (if identities were assigned, students can meet with other students who were assigned the same identity).
- Ask students to share the ideas they wrote about. Students should not be required to share their writing – this helps students appreciate writing as a process, not a product.
- Ask students to reflect in pairs, small group, as a class or in their portfolios: What insight did they gain from the process? How might this help their critical thinking about the work or body of work?
