My students need 250 scientific journals to assist them with organizing their work and keeping it in order to reference work for new topics from previous topics.
The first day of every school year my students come to class excited and ready to learn. It is a very exciting day and then I ask them to get organized and they give me a somewhat blank look. The scientific journals will help them develop skills for college to be organized.
I teach in the inner city of a large city in Minnesota.
Last year we were told that our school is in the bottom 5% schools for performance. They are high school students who are in biology, honors biology, and IB/ AP biology. This is shocking to me as my students love to learn and want to be good students. As I think about why this is....its because they need modeling of how to be organized and they need the support of their teachers to start and maintain their scientific journals. Many of them have challenges at home that make it more difficult to gather the proper resources for class. Some are homeless, some have lost or are in the process of losing their home, many of them move at least once if not more during the school year. My students come to school to learn and to have an environment they can control. They want to go to college. They want someone to believe in them and tell them that they cannot wait to find out where they will go to school next. They are wonderful.
My Project
Before I did organized journal I had students returning from college to tell me how helpful their science notebooks were that they created. I reflected about what they did to make great notebooks and realized that they were students who could organize themselves. Wouldn't it be great if all my students had the skill or organizing?
With the scientific journals my students will keep notes, activities, labs, and homework in their journal. Last year we used journals and the students loved to stay on track and became obsessed (in a good way) about how organized I was as well as how organized they were. Journals allow students to easily see what they need to do if they are gone and how they can be organized. At the end of the year many students realized that their journals were a reference for their future science classes. A group of IB biology students will be continuing with me for a second year and we created a file cabinet for them to store their notebooks.
Scientific journals will help all students learn how to organize material for success in high school as well as college.
The journals are a great way for students to look back on what they learned during the school year. At the end of the year many students looked at their notebooks and were thrilled that they had done so much work and they remembered it. Students cherish their journals. Out of 160 students last year only 2 had replaced their journals. Students were proud of their journals!
More than half of students from low‑income households
Data about students' economic need comes from the National Center for Education Statistics, via our partners at MDR Education. Learn more
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