The double entry diary

Over the past couple of weeks I have been defining content literacy in my own words. So far I have come up with something that goes like this: The ability to use reading and writing in all subjects through various creative content-specific strategies.

In class we have been learning different content-specific strategies and how to use them in the classroom. One of the strategies we learned is called the double entry diary. This is a great strategy that will help your students read texts that are difficult for them. It is a good way to organize your thoughts and ideas from readings. In class we made double entry diaries for three different types of texts. We had to make one for a chapter from the book Do I really have to teach reading: Content comprehension, grades 6-12, by Cris Tovani, we made another double entry diary for an article we read on small pox, and the third double entry diary was a math problem that our teacher gave us. Here is a picture of my double entry diary for chapter 2 in the Tovani text:

I organized my thoughts in two different categories. On the left I have different examples and quotes taken from the text and on the right is where I share my thoughts and connections that I make to the text. The double entry diary was very helpful for something like this because it made me think deeply about the text and different ways I could use the examples from the text in my classroom. 

This is a picture of my double entry diaries for the math problem and the article on smallpox. In my math classes I have to explain all of my math problems. So doing this double entry diary for math was no new to me. I think it would be a good strategy in the classroom, but I don’t think it is the most helpful strategy. The explanation on the right is exactly what you see on the left. I just don’t see these really helping students because you are just explaining the steps you took to solve the problem. The double entry diary for the smallpox article I did not find helpful at all. The article is a bunch of facts so on the left side I had a lot to write down, but on the right I had nothing to say because everything was already explained on the left.

I really enjoyed learning how to use the double entry diary. I definitely saw in class ways that it can be helpful and also ways that it isn’t helpful. I think this is a great strategy to use with your students if you use it for the right text. It is a great way to make you think deeper about different readings and have an organized way to write down your thoughts and connections. 

Our teacher has us listen to very interesting podcasts and this week we listened to a podcast from the Hempfield School District that talked about different content literacy strategies and how students need to stop relying on their teachers for answers. The teachers in the podcast were saying that students are now not challenging themselves to figure out their own problems. Instead they are going to the teacher to get the answer and not figure it out on their own. I can completely understand this because i know that when I was in middle school I would give up on my school work a lot. I would go to the teacher and ask for help. A lot of my teachers would just guide me to the answer, but I definitely had some teachers who would give me answers to problems out of frustration. I think it is important for teachers to figure out where the student is confused and help solve their confusion by guiding them to the right answer. Students need to discover answers on their own. There are many different strategies that can be used, and every teacher needs to find one because there will always be students that just want to  give up.