There must be a clearly defined system of order and organization in place for students, and roles must be distinctly established. Clarity and consistency are absolutely fundamental to the believability and maintenance of our world. Each teacher will need to take a focused look at what can realistically be done in his or her own classroom, considering things like classroom configuration, individual teacher goals, school and district requirements, student interest and skill level, and established need.
The student artifact that will hold all the things we do in and for class - the work, the tasks, the notes, the explorations - is the dossier. I toyed with calling it many different things: Daily Journal, Travel Log, Travel Guide, Field Notes, World Guide, World Manual. Each had pros and cons to it, but ultimately I decided on the French word dossier because, in addition to being a French word that we have co-opted into English, for me it best encompasses the idea of a working collection of information. Dossiers grow, and the information is used in different appropriate and actionable ways; the information is gathered for a purpose. I want students to think of all that we do as useful to a goal, so where "guides" get at information useful to navigate a place, and "logs" get at reflections, and "notes" get at the study of something, "dossiers" get at all of those things, as a compendium of information that is useful for navigating and knowing our world as well as reflections on that information, toward an end outside of merely being there and experiencing it.
Strategy: The Dossier
All class work, center work (see Activity B: Centers with a Twist), daily Do Nows, and notes will be completed in a composition book that we will call a dossier. Students will date every entry they make. We will use the idea of the interactive notebook, which considers the notebook as made up of two distinct halves; as seen when the book is opened, there is the page that is the right side and that which is the left. Here, the right side page is for facts - the entry, work, information, or vocabulary; the left is reserved for relevant notes, synthesis, and creative exploration of the work, as well as feedback from me. Within this general structure there is freedom of interpretation, so that for one student, in one instance, a picture might be considered like a fact, as a visual representation of something, and thus put on the right side; whereas in other instances it might be seen as more of a creative synthesis of information and so live on the left. I would much rather have a student begin to consider why he or she is conceiving of something as fact or creation than trifle with regulations about what belongs where.
Dossiers will be composition books; their compact, portable, sturdy shape - distinct from the rest of the notebooks already in use - will set them apart as something special. I will ask students to get at least four for the year (one per marking period), although they may find that they need more. I expect the dossier process to help make real the importance or at least the habit of dating and labeling every assignment. You do this when you are documenting information, so you can look back over your work and remember what you did when. As part of this work, you can supply images or ask students to bring in or create images and use them as springboards for activities; you can also ask students to draft song/rhyme ideas and other creative explorations of our topics or attach things that illustrate the sensory details of the work. I hope that the dossier becomes a treasured resource for students as they take ownership of it in this process.
These dossiers will be helpful in alleviating issues revolving around students absent from class. Upon return, absent students will need to pair with a student who was present (a neighbor). That student must explain the missed day's goal, the result, and the way it was achieved. The absent student then will summarize that conversation in his or her dossier, using English as necessary, and list all pertinent French vocabulary and phrases. This will follow a format that I will give to students at the beginning of the year, and I will also have it printed on paper. That way students are helping each other, absent students are still involved but not asked to do something that they won't understand, and they are able to join in on the next class.
