Whose Notes are They Anyway?

I realized my class notes needed a makeover the day I saw all of my students close their journals and put them away after the lesson when it was time for independent practice.

The Problem: My students were passively learning (if learning at all) as they copied words, numbers, letters, and symbols I wrote on the board. No matter how interactive I made the lesson, the note taking portion was minimally impactful on their learning at best.

The Solution: Change my mindset and my actions about class notes from MY notes to THEIR notes.

The five strategies below encompass the changes I made in my classroom to foster an environment that celebrates my students' notes.

Strategy #1: Encourage Doodling, Coloring, and Creative Expression with Materials

Before, every one of my students took notes in pencil and pencil only. No matter how many colors I used at the board to model as I would highlight, illustrate, and distinguish concepts, my students used a single writing utensil - their pencil, to create a monochromatic record of the lesson.

My solution: I distributed markers and colored pencils to the tables along with sticky notes and highlighters to encourage personalization, creativity, and joy in the note taking process. There was something exciting about art supplies on the tables as they entered the room that elicited happiness from my students! With the materials nearby, my students could make THEIR notes THEIR own.

Bucket of Markers, Colored Pencils, Highlighters, Sticky Notes on Classroom Table

Strategy #2: Bring Math to Life with Real Examples

Short animations, simulations, or hands-on models bring concepts to life and provide background knowledge for students. I want my students to have access to mental images of their experiences in my classroom. And, during lessons, I want them to transfer those images to their notes through drawings, diagrams, illustrations, so their notes mean so much more to them!

I've always incorporated real life examples as much as possible into my lessons, but what changed was my added encouragement to my students to create an artifact of this in their notes. I challenged them to draw pictures of what they remembered and add thought bubbles and captions, too. If we used candies to model the process of finding fractional parts of a whole, then I want them to use markers to illustrate the experience with candies in math class in their notes, too.

Strategy #3: Provide Question Prompts or Sentence Stems within Class Notes

I started to give my students time to put what they are learning in their own words. I use prompts such as:

• How will I know ___ when I see it?
• The most important part of this is...
• I might forget...

At first, my students wanted me to tell them what to write, because that's what I had always done. When they did, I encouraged them to turn to a neighbor and talk through what they might write and share ideas. Then, they could add to their notes as they responded to the prompts. I modeled my thinking after they had time to generate their own ideas and before we shared and celebrated the responses from each other.

This is how the students are making their notes THEIR notes, by writing down THEIR thoughts.

Strategy #4: Give Them Time to Make Notes

I want to show the students I value their thinking, reflecting, and creative note taking by granting them time to do so. I know thinking about the math is how the students learn about the math. So, I try very hard to not steal their thinking from them. I give them time to think and write and illustrate.

Sometimes a few minutes seem like an eternity, but I explain to my students that it is important for them to think about the math and I am going to be quiet and let them do just that.

Strategy #5: Celebrate and Share Notes

We take photos of things we value - our children, our pets, our friends and families. So, I take photos of what my students create (because I value it) and I encourage them to share with each other as well.

Celebrating note taking may sound odd - there's no correct answer, no grade to bring home. But, when the students are proud of what they create when they are learning math, that's worth remembering!

One day recently, I was pleased to see my students referencing their creative, colorful, and personalized notes as they worked on their independent practice. And they were happy when I asked to take photos of their notes!

Student Notes

Student Notes

Digital Note Taking

I mentioned previously how my students took notes in a journal with pencils (at first) then markers, colored pencils, and highlighters. Photographing or scanning their final products with Notes allows them to be shared, organized, and archived.

Students can also use their iPad and Apple Pencil to create notes, like the example below. Though only a single color (green) was used to accent the notes, that color was strategically chosen for exponential decay because of the mental image (and color) of bacteria that came to mind when learning about real life examples of the concept. In Notes, they can be shared, tagged, organized, and referenced as the students go on to learn about more complex concepts.

Digital Math Notes

Reflection

Please know I didn't make this change overnight. It wasn't one day of poor note taking strategies then the next a miraculous overhaul of my teaching.

To tell the truth, the day after I realized I needed a change (the one when I noticed my students closing their journals and putting them away instead of referencing them during independent practice time), I moved to having my students use individual dry erase boards instead. Yes, what they wrote was not permanent and could not be referenced later, but that wouldn't change my students' current practice anyway. And, using dry erase markers was exciting to them and I could see what they were writing. I felt like I was able to hold their attention longer and they didn't seem as stressed about writing every word, number, and symbol. Rather, they worked through examples and practiced along with me during the lesson. This served as a bridge between my earlier poor note taking practice and the new, creative method I was ready to move toward that would benefit my students' learning much more.