Best Practices

Are you doing what it takes to be a teacher whose practices are identified as BEST?

Everyone relies on notes to jog their faulty memories. We often forget more than we remembered and rely on notes to keep track of all the things we need to know. As teachers, we expect students to take notes during class for the same reasons.

Sometimes the notes we scribble down on a scrap piece of paper fail us – we can’t read the hurried writing or don’t recognize the phone number written. Class notes can fail a student, too for the same reasons.

Students tend to take notes only when the teacher puts something on the board, on an overhead, or if they are directly instructed to take notes. Simply copying what the teacher has written on the chalkboard doesn’t result in much learning or provide help to the student when s/he begins to study for a test or prepare for a project using the material.

Two different techniques for more effective note-taking can be taught to students with relative ease. One way to improve note-taking is for students to take notes only on the right hand pages of a notebook, leaving the left-hand pages blank. This technique is used in History Alive, a new hands-on history/social studies program many schools are adopting. Students write what the teacher says or has on the chalkboard/overhead on the right side of their notebook, reserving the left side to draw accompanying pictures at a later time. By transforming the oral/written notes into visual pictures, students are more likely to be able to use the written concepts, facts, and ideas in their notes. Additionally, the information moves from the simple knowledge/comprehension level on Bloom’s taxonomy to synthesis, where a student takes information and transforms it into a new form.

Another method to enhance note-taking is for the teacher to stop the lesson five minutes before the end of the class and have the student read back over his/her notes for the day. After looking at what was discussed during class, the student then summarizes the notes under a heading: What I Learned Today. After summarizing, the student jots down any questions s/he may still have under the heading: Questions Remaining. Finally, the student predicts what kinds of things the next day’s class is going to deal with; in other words, how will the next lesson build on today’s information? The heading for this part of the reflection is What’s Next?

Utilizing either or both of these techniques for effective note-taking will help students learn more from their note-taking rather than simply copying letters and words from the board or the overhead onto paper.