Blog 6

Chapter 7:

I absolutely believe that note-taking and note-making are imperative skills to have.  However, I do not believe that this skills develop automatically.  Rather, teachers need to practice with their students repetitively and with different formats.  Throughout high school, many of my teachers actually collected our notes.  For example, my history teacher assigned cornell notes for textbook readings.  At the time, taking the notes seemed boring and redundant.  Looking back, I can say without hesitation, the notes prepared me for all of my college courses.  I am able to listen selectively and pick apart lectures and textbooks for the most valuable and important information.  I really liked the general notetaking procedures that the chapter suggested.  While looking over them, I had multiple “A-ha!” moments as I was able to recognize that I use many of the suggestions.  To name a few, I use indentations, abbreviations and skip lines to indicate a change in ideas.  It might be beneficial to have these suggestions posted in my future classroom.  

The chapter seemed to emphasize reflection.  Not only is it important to take notes, but it is key to review your notes multiple times to retain the information.  The teacher can facilitate this by starting discussions based on previous notes as exemplified in Ms. Tsai’s Social Studies class.  

One thing that I had never thought about before prior to reading the chapter is the fact that note taking provides an opportunity to, “react to controversial material privately”.   I thought that was very profound and again, this goes along with the statement that students need to reflect on their notes.  A reflection period with controversial material gives a student time to formulate appropriate questions and truly think about the content in a serious manner.  

Questions: 

1.   Does each content area have an optimum format for notes or does research suggest it’s based on a student’s preference? 

2.  It seems as though teachers can only help students with notetaking and notemaking skills through practice, self-assessment and feedback.  How often should teachers provide their students with feedback for notes? 

Blog 5

Chapter 3: 

Chapter three proposed many ways to enrich vocabulary for different content areas.  It also included multiple profound statements regarding vocabulary.  First, it stated that vocabulary heavily influences reading comprehension.  In addition, the author claimed, “teaching words in isolation exclusively” is an ineffective way to teach vocabulary.  Furthermore, as the chapter argues knowing the definition of a word is not enough.  Rather, knowing a word is understanding it’s word schema. I could not agree more with these ideas.  Dr. Hanna always talks about the diversity we will face in our future classrooms and that is pertinent to know our students.  For instance, one read-aloud lesson may include a book about the beach.  While we would assume that everyone knows beach vocabulary, some students may not have any connections, thus hindering comprehension.  For example, they may not understand what the words “tide” and “dune” mean.  It is the teacher’s responsibility to create prior knowledge for her students if it is absent.  This could include a video, a field trip or even bring in sand for the students to feel.  

The strategies suggested seem to be very useful.  I particularly liked the “shades of meaning” strategy.  I found it to be extremely creative.  Personally, while I write papers, I try to replace “normal” words for those of higher quality.  Many times, I use a thesaurus.  At times, I have trouble picking a word with the correct meaning that I am looking for because I was never taught “shades of meaning”.  

Questions: 

There are different strategies discussed within each content area.  Are the strategies more beneficial when used for the particular content areas? 

I find the semantic feature analysis to be confusing.  All of the plusses and minuses are overwhelming for me. Is there a way to make it more beneficial?