Improving report writing

Back Story

The journey in Bookworm has been a long one. There has been many things that I have learned and got opportunities to do. In my school we did have a library, but it never interested me enough for me to go and read there. When I joined Bookworm I got introduced to a good collection of books which had me gripped to reading. The shift in reading and doing many other things was quite fast except for one thing- writing reports.

For me expressing myself by talking face to face is easier than writing it down, because when writing I am not sure of what I am trying to say , whether that has been conveyed correctly to the other person and I cannot read reactions and responses. When I would try and write even an  email I  find that I think about it a lot, read it many  times over and in the end I would have wasted my time and delayed in sending it out.

And Now

At Bookworm we have a practice of sharing a report after every library session. So  after each session I would always be tense or stressed out that I have to report and in the  end , I would be up sending late reports or to try and avoid it , I would end up doing other things and ignore writing the report. As a result, every other LiS meeting then I would be asked about it. And my colleagues gave suggestions like ‘making notes  of what all happened in the class and keeping it in front you when writing the report and the first thing after you come back from school is write your reports so that it is not in your way.’

When I write I find that I struggle with putting forth what I want to say which would slow down my speed of typing and then it took me ages to complete the reports. So then I started trying different things.  Like once the session was over on the way back to the library, I would start writing the report. This never went far.

Another thing I tried was, the Speech to Text App – I downloaded this app on my phone and felt that it would help me in my report writing. This app has the facility of recording one’s speech and converting it into text, then one can copy this text and paste it wherever one wants to save it. I was happy with this for some time but then, the app would not catch the exact words and it was became double work for me  to correct the text. Also, in 2 – 3 instances when I was doing this, the other people in the library saw me talking and they thought that I was talking to my phone all by myself like I had gone crazy!

I tried most of the things that my colleagues suggested but it was turning out that I was reporting on the plan I was doing rather than writing the responses of the children or what happened in the class. Sujata’s feedback was often like this, “ How did the children do on the extension activity?? “ “What should we know from your session plan in action “  “Why is the report repeating the same thing ?????” “Disappointing report with no qualitative input, Jewel – I expect more!”

It was at this point I began to really think of what I could do !  How can I change this? So, then I came up with an idea that was one where I would record my whole session in the classroom. This turned out to be very helpful. When writing the reports, I would listen to the recording and write the reports. It also helped as I would now not miss out on children’s response and I also got a chance to think back and see what happened in each of the sessions and work on it in a much better way. Getting Sujata’s comments on the reports written after this was nice.  It was like I was getting somewhere now !

This is what my feedback now reads like !  “Congratulations on an active participatory class and a good detailed report. ”

“Welcome back! I have been waiting for this level of preparedness. ”

“I have been waiting for this report because I know how much you prepped and thought about the story and the pre-story and the context. Very well done.”

It is like I have found my own way of how I can write my reports and I am aware that there is more to all of this, but I happy to have reached here finally !