Note Taking

With a toddler and an infant, I don't spend much time these days thinking about my professional self.  But still, every once and a while thoughts come to me about how and what I will teach when I return to teaching after the kids have started school. 

Just now I was doing some needlepoint to pass the time while waiting for Craiglist ads to load.  I thought about how long its taken me to do this block project (about 5 months) and if it would take longer if I was teaching, but the kids were older.  That got me thinking if I could do any needlepoint while at school when I would be listening.  It didn't sounds absurb, especially since I've had students knit in class before.  However, that made me think about what you should be doing with your hands while your listening to students in class, and that is usually taking notes to grade.  Likewise, students should be using their hands to take notes in class. 

Thus, the subject of this blog occurred to me: Note taking. 

In my five years of teaching, students at all levels had pretty much no note taking skills.  I usually would try to teach kids about different types of note taking over the course of the year.  We'd cover note taking while reading, while listening, and for research projects.  But thinking about this subject now, I may have found the root of the problem.  Students don't understand the purpose of note taking.  Some don't understand the overall reason, but what I really mean is what is driving them to take these specific notes. 

When I return to teaching, one subject I must cover is how note taking for English is different than for other subjects.  When I would teach students about taking notes while reading, they would take comprehension notes.  They were taking notes on content of the plot, much how they would take notes from a history or science textbook.  But in high school English especially honors, that is not what is important.  Reading notes for English are about how one reacts to or thinks about the text.  These notes should be about patterns, questions, connections, predictions, symbols, and language.  Going back over plot notes will probably not help one find an idea to contribute during class discuss or find a topic to write a five page essay.  But, notes that show thinking about the text are a much stronger place to start. 

In the past, I tried various types of journaling and post-it note requirements to get students to record their thinking about a text.  At first, I required both for all reading, but I soon learned that it killed any joy in reading.  By my last year of teaching, I decided we needed to differentiate the types of reading we do in my classroom.  Most of the reading was for pleasure and practice.  Students did not have to take notes on these books, but did have to pick one every month or so to discuss with other students via the web.  But, a few times a year, there were texts on which all students needed to take notes that recorded their thinking on the text.  These were the texts we read together to discuss at length (for my freshmen they were Animal Farm and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; my sophomores analyzed To Kill a Mockingbird and The Great Gatsby).  One of the most important parts of this change was the difference in how we read different types of texts.  When I read at home for pleasure, I do not take notes, and if I did, they would be sparse emotional reactions.  But, when I read knowing that I must discuss what I'm reading or write about it later, I take copious notes to record what I'm thinking as I read.  Students need to see this difference in reading to understand why I am making them take these notes. 

Even my best students did not take notes during discussion.  When I actively taught the topic, and collected notes, the results were poor for most students.  They had a very hard time pulling out the key ideas from a discussion of a text.  Most students would instead try to write down everything (often including who said it making almost a transcript) or only a few scattered ideas.  Some students wouldn't even copy down information written on the board!  Again, one of the keys here is that discussion of a text is different than a lecture given in another content area classroom.  Students need to learn how the teacher guides students through the most important parts of the text being discussed.  They need to see that as the text is discussed, they should jot down their ideas that stem from discussion because these will give them a base for their later work with a text. 

Research notes are still different.  I'm very old school when it comes to how I teach research notes for a large project.  For short texts, I spend a lot of time teaching students how to high light and annotate in the margins, again focusing on their thoughts about a subject rather than repeating content.  But, when the rest of the school drops the huge annual research project, we need a different approach.  Suddenly, content is important. While a high school research project becomes excellent when it includes student thinking rather than restating facts, most students still need help keeping track of all those facts.  When students don't, plagiarism runs wild.  So, when teaching note taking for a big research project, I go old school.  I make students fill out index cards where they must summarize or paraphrase the text with only one idea per card and include the citation information at the top.  Then I show them how to organize the cards to form their  paper.  Most students resist!  They would rather cut and paste from their Google print outs, which usually results in no mixture or sources and no analysis either.  Every year a few students would tell me that once they embraced the process, they really saw how easy it was to draft their paper.  Again, it comes to the purpose of the note taking.  Students were failing to see that their notes need to facilitate citation, synthesis, and analysis. 

After today's thinking, I am ready to return to the subject of note taking with new vigor and the next time around, the key will getting students to see the difference in purpose for each note taking experience. 

Student Teaching

I saw a former student last week who is starting her student teaching today.  Of course, seeing her got me thinking about the biggest lessons I learned from my student teaching experience.   


I didn't have the best student teaching experience.   It could have been much, much worse, but overall I didn't get anywhere near as much out of it as I could have.  A lot of that had to do with my personality, but it could have been better with better mentors and just different circumstances. 

The most important lesson I learned from student teaching was that you can't be any other teacher.  You have to create your own rules and consequences, your own procedures, your own lessons, your own grading system.  You can not just adopt these from another teacher.  True, teachers borrow from each other all the time.  But when you do so, you make adjustments.  You can't just take everything one teacher does and try to do it yourself.  During my student teaching, I was trying to just fill in the shoes of my mentor teacher instead of figuring out who I was as a teacher.  As I said, some of this was the circumstances of when I took over teaching because my mentor suddenly was out with pneumonia and I had to take over several days earlier than we planned.  Because of that and my timid personality, I spent most of my experience feeling more like a substitute than the real teacher.  But, I learned the lesson.  When it came time for me to have my own classroom, I was very ready to figure out how to do things my way. 

Other than this big lesson, I would say that student teaching is a great experience to just get you used to the feel of teaching everyday.  Doing attendance, writing passes, using a grade book, writing on the board, handing out papers, figuring out when to go to the bathroom, using the xerox machine, and dressing appropriately (which is a bigger deal for a young woman than a man).  There are the other bigger jobs that one always thinks of, namely writing lessons, grading, and discipline, but these small jobs are important to get the feel of and student teaching provides just that.  And, if you want it to, student teaching also is a great opportunity to try: experimenting with new technology, network with other teachers (both in and out of your discipline), work with administrators, get involved with extracurricular activities, and communicate with parents.