Daybooks were first discussed by Donald Murray (1986) in relation to a writer's notebook. Murray explained how writers use daybooks to make lists, capture ideas, compose a first draft, and play with writing. Brannon, Griffin, Haag, Iannone, Urbanski, and Woodward (2008) later explained how readers and writers use daybooks within the reading and writing classroom to document thinking. Ms. Wilson extended the ideas of Brannon et al. by adding “foldables” (Zike, 2008) to her students' daybooks and by focusing on comprehension. In this way, the daybook became the reading equivalent of Murray's writing daybook.
Daybooks offer students a tool to help them understand how to coordinate and organize learning about comprehension strategies while focusing on the content of their text. This organization adds depth to students' understanding of how to employ the moves of strategic readers. Research by Duke, Pearson, Strachan, and Billman (2010) suggests that such instruction optimizes student comprehension. In the daybook, students produce a systematic record about how to
organize and track learning with a table of contents,
recall the metacognitive language of readers,
employ tools that aid comprehension during reading,
remember mentor texts (Dorfman & Cappelli, 2007) used to teach comprehension strategies, and
try out this learning during independent response time.
The comprehension instruction described in this article is based on the comprehension research of proficient readers (Duke, Pearson, Strachan, & Billman, 2010) and how to apply those strategies using tools for understanding (Buehl, 2008; Harvey & Goudvis, 2007; Zike,2008). We define tools for understanding as graphic organizers, foldables, study guides, or charts that students complete as they read. Asking students to add tools for understanding to their daybooks was important for Ms. Wilson because she would find loose, completed Venn diagrams, for example, crammed into binders with papers falling out the sides, wadded and shoved into desks, or worse, thrown in the trash. Later, when Ms. Wilson wanted students to use a Venn diagram, they could not find their work or understand how to use it during independent reading. One student described the daybook as “a place where you aren't going to lose the things you need to study.”
