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?
"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?"-I wonder the same thing. It seems that assessing students with their notes is wrong but to teach them how to take appropriate notes then this is needed. Great questions. I would love to better understand this.
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