ENVS 410 Journal Prompts

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Journal Responses

As part of the Spring ENVS 410 Environmental Education class, you will be keeping a journal. Every teaching week, I'm asking you to write 3 or more entries (basically every day you teach). But don't just take my word for it (find more here), teaching journals are stated over and over again to be essential to working through what happens in the classroom:

Benefits of Reflective Journaling

Reflective writing enables the documentation of experiences, thoughts, questions, ideas and conclusions that signpost our learning journey.

Reflective writing provides an opportunity for us to think critically about what we do and why.

It provides:

a record of events and results and our reactions to them,
data on which to base reflective discussion,
opportunity for us to challenge ourselves and what we do and to free us to do it differently and better,
impetus to take action that is informed and planned,
development of a personal philosophy of teaching,
an opportunity to view our teaching objectively and not see all problems as personal inadequacy,
an enrichment to our classroom because we are prepared to innovate,
increased confidence through increased insight which enables us to trust our students and enjoy them,
basic documentation to support future entries in our teaching portfolio and for job applications etc.

Journal Prompts

Every week we will be focusing on a different theme (see your syllabus for more info). I'll be providing you with prompts for writing in your journal. While I think it is important that you structure your journal in a way that will be most useful for you, I'd also recommend answering one or two of these questions every week. I've tried to choose topics and questions that will help you with this project and to think critically about its most essential elements.