How will students respond to keeping an online journal? What evidence of their developing identities comes through in their writing?

Seminar Title

How will students respond to keeping an online journal? What evidence of their developing identities comes through in their writing?

SEL, Writing, Equity

5th Grade

Middle School

Language Arts

Writing

Have you ever felt like you needed to get your students writing more? How about feeling like you’ve focused a lot on content and not enough on social emotional learning? Have you wanted to give your students more opportunities to process life and develop their voice in writing? If you answered “yes” to any of these, this may be the session for you! After researching studies that have been conducted around journal writing, social emotional learning, and identity development, as well as my teaching team voicing the need to get our students writing more in the online environment this fall, I decided to implement online journal writing! Our fifth graders are going to middle school next year and we wanted to make sure they had time and space to process their self awareness and social awareness, especially during a pandemic year. There were some unforeseen obstacles with using Google Slides and students’ typing stamina, but we pushed through. By the end of the data collection period many were requesting to write in their notebooks instead! This session is probably best for upper elementary grades and up, but if you want to talk about identity development, social emotional learning, and journal writing, this is the place to be!