ACTIVE LEARNING TECHNIQUE 23
Intrigue Journal
| Complexity involved in | |
| Planning | LOW |
| Developing Materials | LOW |
| Implementing in Class | MODERATE |
Description and Purpose
With an Intrigue Journal, students intentionally listen during a lecture to identify what they consider to be the most-intriguing ideas presented. They record their thoughts about these interesting points in an ongoing journal.
Intrigue Journal gives students a task for listening, which helps them to focus their attention. It helps students deepen their understanding of course-related ideas and concepts. It helps them engage with the material directly because they must assign it personal meaning—they find it interesting or surprising or controversial—rather than simply recording it. In addition, it encourages students to have a positive outlook about the information. The Intrigue Journal is an outlet for reflection on the information presented in a lecture, which helps to solidify it and ultimately deepen student learning.
Preparation
- Decide how students will record journal entries and store their journals. Although you can use a lined table, you might consider a more high-tech solution, which can be easier to keep track of for the students and for you.
- Consider how you will assess the journal. If you give it a grade, students will take it more seriously. A good option for determining a grade is to develop a rubric.
- Consider providing students with sample journal entries—doing so can help them understand the parameters of the assignment and can alleviate some anxiety.
Procedures
- Announce the activity and tell students how they should record entries and store their journals.
- Tell them that at the end of each lecture they should write a journal entry about what most intrigued them by providing the following:
- The date and lecture topic
- A list of three to five points addressing what they found most interesting, resonant, or controversial
- A rationale for their selection
- Consider having students report out their selections or alternately review their entries and describe their selections in the next course session to tie the information to new information to come.
| Online Lecture | Large Lecture |
| This technique is easy to implement in most learning management systems (LMSs). If you have students blog within the LMS, you can set up preferences so that each student's blog is kept private from other students but still enables you access as the instructor. If your LMS had a journal feature, you can set up regular due dates for the assignments. Alternately you can ask students to set up their own blogs on which they can post their entries. | Because managing writing assignments in large classes can be a challenge, an approach is to review the journals periodically, assessing with a simple plus-minus system. You can review a sample of journals each time to get a sense of the effort students are putting into the assignment as well as to see what the students are finding interesting. |
Examples
Behavioral Genetics (Lecture)
In this traditional lecture-based course, students learn about the field of behavioral genetics, which is focused on how individual variation can be separated into genetic and environmental components. The professor uses ongoing Intrigue Journals to help students think through complex material.
The class meets twice per week. Students are expected to have read a chapter from the text prior to coming to class. Each lecture focuses on a single topic, such as phenotypic variance and heritability, heritability and complex traits, population and quantitative genetics, and so forth. The professor does a brief review of the main points of the chapter to ensure that students understand it, and she provides students with the opportunity to ask clarification questions.
After each summary, the professor describes a recently published research study related to the topic of the day. She brings in articles from leading journals such as Nature and Science. The research studies are often twin studies or adoption studies. After each research presentation, she asks students to list three to five points in their Intrigue Journals. These points can be what students found interesting, what they found they agreed with, what they found to be particularly controversial, or a combination. She reviews the journals at the end of each month of the semester. She believes that the journals help students to focus on her lectures because it provides them a specific task to complete and to think through the main ideas of the lecture.
Sociology of the Family (Large Lecture)
In this large lecture course, students study the institution of the family from a sociological perspective. Students think about the family as a public and private social institution. The instructor uses interactive lecturing, interspersing active learning assignments and lecture segments. Each class session is focused on a specific topic, such as history of the family, social class, gender, children and parenting, cohabitation and dating, and so forth. The professor uses Intrigue Journals to help students stay focused on the content between sessions and also to apply what they have used in informal writing.
The course meets twice per week, and she saves a few minutes at the end of each session for students to make notes in their journals. She collects journals once per month. She ensures that students have done entries for each session, assessing with a simple plus-minus. She then reviews 25 percent of the entries each time in more depth, to get feedback on her lectures, find out what students are finding interesting, and identify any misconceptions.
Grief, Death and Loss: Social Work (Video Lecture)
In this online course, social work students examine the experience of loss and subsequent grief in their personal lives, the lives of their clients, and their role as professional helpers. The professor has a series of video lectures that she encourages students to watch. She has often felt, however, that students were not taking away as much from them as they might. She decided to use Intrigue Journals to get students to engage with the material and to learn more about what ideas they found compelling.
She posted her lectures and set up the private journal entry function in her LMS. She asked students to watch the videos on the dates listed in the syllabus and then to post a journal entry in which they identify the five most-interesting, resonant, or controversial ideas they heard.
Students seemed to engage in the activity, and each week, she posted a list of student responses to the three prompts, which students also seemed to appreciate. One student wrote about the experience in her final journal entry for the term:
I watched the course video lectures until there were no more. I searched them for ideas, for instructions, for ways to deal with grief and loss and to help others do the same. I have never dealt with grief—I have always buried the grief deep down, hoping it would just go away. I was intrigued by the idea that there are other, better ways. That I can help others find better ways.
And I journaled about these ideas. I was able to capture these ideas in my journal. I wrote what interested me. I wrote what I agreed with. I wrote about what I didn't agree with and why. This was more than summary; it was self-interrogation and self-exploration. It was a plan for my future work with clients. I wrote my journal entries in Word before uploading them, and I plan to save my entries . . . and to continue them. This journal will be a professional resource for me.
Variations and Extensions
- You can make this a collaborative learning activity by using dialogue journals, in which peers exchange journals and read and respond to each entry with comments and questions. Journal writing can be particularly effective when writers know that someone besides the teacher will read and respond to their entries. Moreover, because reading and responding to students can be time-consuming, making this technique a collaborative activity helps ensure students receive timely and critical feedback (see Barkley, Major, & Cross, 2014) without adding too much more to your workload. You can accomplish this variation in class by simply having students journal in a notebook and then pass the notebook to a nearby peer or alternately by having students respond to each other's blog posts.
- Extend this collaborative activity by having students tie their Intrigue Journals to contemporary issues. Students identify what is intriguing to them and then tie the concept to an important current issue in the news. See Barkley and Major (2016, LAT 24) for additional information on this approach.
Observations and Advice
Students can procrastinate on journaling if they have the opportunity to do so. To encourage regular journaling and to help students avoid waiting until the last minute to complete their work, tell students you will be spot-checking blogs randomly throughout the term, or alternately set up a formal evaluation schedule.
Students can see journaling as a “soft” activity, so you may want to attach some points toward the final grade for the activity. If you do so, be sure to assign a sufficient number of points for students to take it seriously (for example, 10 percent of the final grade).
Key References and Resources
- Barkley, E. F. (2010). SET 29: Contemporary issues journal. Student engagement techniques: A handbook for college faculty (pp. 276– 279). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
- Barkley, E. F., & Major, C. H. (2016). LAT 24: Dialogue journals. Learning assessment techniques: A handbook for college faculty (pp. 225–229). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
- Barkley, E. F., Major, C. H., & Cross, K. P. (2014). CoLT 24: Dialogue journals. Collaborative learning techniques: A resource for college faculty (2nd ed., pp. 283–288). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
- Finley, T. (2014). Dipsticks: Efficient ways to check for understanding. Retrieved from www.edutopia.org/blog/dipsticks-to-check-for-understanding-todd-finley