Anonymously Yours - A New-to-Me Twist on Topic Journals

After many months of not blogging, I've decided to get back in that saddle before I forget how to ride.  Here we go again . . . 

I’ve been using Topic Journals to get my students excited about writing for a few years now, ever since I heard about the idea on the English Companion Ning.  Although I’d like to attribute the idea to its rightful architect, I’m not entirely confident that I have the complete history on its origins.  I can tell you that I believe it was Gary Anderson who first introduced me to Topic Journals, and I believe that he attributed the idea to Penny Kittle.  For some reason, I also think that the idea for topic journals is linked to Tom Newkirk, but alas, I’m not certain.  This is the way it goes in education.  Good ideas spread like wildfire and their ancestry is sometimes difficult to pin down.  Good ideas are begged, borrowed, stolen, and, thankfully, shared.  Since this brilliant idea was shared with me, I want to re-share it with you and, in particular, tell you about the twist that I’ve used this year that has inspired better-than-ever topic journal writing.  

Topic journals are shared by a class or several classes and characterized by the topic rather than the writers themselves.  Given that topics can be selected to suit the age, maturity, needs, and interests of your students, these journals can be used at any grade level.

Some of the topics I chose this year for my 7th graders include:

Friends
Mom 
Dad

Family
Lost
Found
Wishes
Dreams
Fear
Death
Passions
Talent
Regrets
Uncomfortable
Obsessed
Boys
Girls
Online
At School 
After School
Weekends
Now, That’s Funny

The key is to have a good range of topics and to have more topics than students so that everyone can choose a topic journal to write in on any given day.  Ask your students for suggestions!  This year, my students asked me to add:

Love
Places
Sport
Wilderness

The process is simple.  You write a topic name on each journal, spread the journals out on a table or the ledge of the blackboard, as I do, and let the students choose one to write in.  I ask that students fill a page (7x9” notebook) and that once they’ve made their choice, they stick with it for the full 20 minutes.  They date their entries, provide a title - if they wish - and write.  

Students usually spend about 20 minutes writing in the journals.  Of course, students are anxious to read what others have written in the journals before they begin.  In fact, I often hear students telling their friends to choose the topic that they chose last time we wrote in the journals, so that their friends can read their writing.  Ah, middle school.  It’s all about the friends.

Genres are at students’ discretion, and my students have tried them all - poetry, stories, monologues, nonfiction pieces, personal narrative, letters, persuasive pieces . . .  When a student wants to write a longer piece, he/she just writes ‘to be continued’ at the bottom of the page and continues with it the next time or the time after that.  In fact, that’s one way to know that the topic journals are really working; they’re inspiring students to work on pieces for extended periods of time, pieces they want to come back to again and again to finish.  When students find something they want to put that much effort into, we talk about using the ideas for a more polished piece of writing.  More and more this year, I have student writers who want to hang on to those journals for longer periods, who want to come back to them, who wait and watch to see who is reading their last piece.

So what is it about this year's process that has made this year’s journals so much better?  This year students are writing semi-anonymously.  In previous years I’ve had my students sign their name at the end of their journal entry.  I felt it important that students be accountable for their writing, for their words in black and white.  My concerns hovered around the potential for the writing to embody complete and utter silliness, to be riddled with gratuitous vulgarity, or perhaps worse, to be sparse and uninspired.  In addition, I was eager to use their topic journal writing in student/teacher conferences and, if the writing was worthy, for formative assessments.  This year, if they wish to sign their name, they’re more than welcome to, and some do (those are the students who beg their friends to read what they wrote last time).  Others identify themselves by their student number instead of their name, which has given us a perfect mix of accountability (I can identify them by their student numbers) and anonymity (to their peers, who don’t know their student numbers).  

And it’s been so interesting to watch these anonymous 12 and 13 year olds read one another’s writing with such verve, and write with such abandon.  The writing has become meaningful to them in ways that other writing assignments for our class and their blogs are not.  Of course these other forms of writing serve students well - very well, in fact - in other ways, but in the topic journals, students are obviously feeling free to try new voices, to play with new ideas, and to say what’s really on their minds.  This, for me, seems the true purpose of the topic journal - to experiment.  

Why did it take this strange mix of accountability and anonymity to get students writing this way?  Why wouldn’t students want to sign their name to what is likely some of the most promising writing they do in my classes?  Why aren’t they proud of their ability to dive in, to take risks and try new things?

After some head-scratching, I keep coming back to something I said earlier in this piece - middle school is all about the friends.  Students at this age are unsure of themselves, unsure of what they want to show their peers about who they really are and what they can really do, especially if it’s close to their hearts.  Risk taking is well . . . too risky.  You might stand out.  You might show a side of yourself that your friends can’t yet handle.  My students are obviously not rattled at the thought that I, their teacher, will see that side of themselves, that I will witness their excellence. They know that I am using their student numbers to identify their writing, and they do not seem worried about baring their thoughts, feelings, and creative minds to me.  

 I can’t decide if it’s always been this way with adolescents.  Was I like that?  Oh yeah.  I was just like that, but I never had the opportunity to write anonymously.  Not in school, in any case.  
One more wonderful thing that’s happening with these topic journals is that students are reading one another’s work and wanting to respond, which in and of itself is not incredibly unusual, as they do respond to one another on their blogs.  What’s different?  They don’t always know the author of the piece to which they are responding.  Connections between students who might not otherwise read, write or speak to one another are happening, and even though those connections may not grow into a more open dialogue and a more ‘real life’ connection, I think that it’s pretty wonderful.