Summer Book Review: 101 Strategies

Anyone that knows me well knows that I often have my nose stuck in a book.  It is definitely one of my favorite past times and during the summer, I can frequently be found on the back patio with a book.  (Of course, that often leads to my mom teasing me about having a great tan on the front of my legs and the back of my legs being a bright white!)  Thanks to the #MTBoS and some great clearance sales at Half Price books last week, I have at least 25 edu-books in my to-be-read pile plus an uncountable number of fiction books waiting on my Kindle.

A few days ago, a tweet from Kathryn Freed caught my eye:

Kathryn's tweet started me thinking about some of the vocabulary books that I had in my "Summer Reads" pile.  This upcoming year, I will be teaching AP Statistics and Geometry, both which are heavy on the vocabulary.  In Geometry, I anticipate several ELL students as well, so I wanted to work on strategies to help all students be more successful academically.

One of the books in my pile happened to be "101 Strategies to Make Academic Vocabulary Stick", which I received as part of my ASCD membership:

Note:  If you love to read edu-literature, I highly recommend joining ASCD.  For $69 a year (or less if there happens to be a coupon), I am a "Select Online" member, which gives me access to the awesome Educational Leadership magazine plus 5 free e-books per year

Overall, this book had a very nice organizational structure.  Chapter 1 dealt with the various types of memory structures in our brains before diving into the actual strategies, which the author had split into 3 chapters.  Chapter 2 included strategies for introducing and encoding new vocabulary, then Chapter 3 worked with rehearsal strategies, and Chapter 4 dealt mainly with review and retrieval strategies.  Many of the strategies were interchangeable throughout the "make it stick" process.  Finally, Chapter 5 wrapped it up with how to assess vocabulary retention and how to plan for successful vocabulary instruction.

The book had some really good take-aways, which I'll get to in a minute, but my biggest disappointment was that "academic vocabulary" was rarely used to mean "content area vocabulary", rather it was more in line with what I would consider "SAT type words".  This is definitely a book I would recommend to my AVID colleagues as well as my ELA friends because I know that in our AVID classes, we really work hard on academic reading & writing and "owning" those words so that kids are comfortable using what the author calls "Tier 2" and "Tier 3" words while speaking and writing.  The strategies in this book would be extremely useful  for any teacher that wants to develop a vocabulary-rich classroom.

With that said, here are some of the strategies and ideas that I will definitely use:

Open with a Cloze - 
I've done this before, especially in AP Stat.  In this strategy, you create sentences that leave out a key word and try to have students complete each sentence.  I often use this during AP Review to remind them of all of the vocabulary we have learned throughout the year.  I typically provide a word bank to help students out.

WKWL - 
This is a modification of the typical KWL chart, but with the extra "W" for Word at the beginning.  I've never been a fan of KWLs to be honest, mainly because of the "Want to know" heading, so I will probably modify this as a pre/post idea of WKL - Word, What we Know about the Word, What we Learned about the Word.  I think this could be a great strategy in Geometry because often we have words that kids have some familiarity with from previous courses.

Vocabnotation -
I'll admit, this is a strategy that makes me wish I was teaching AVID again!  Vocabnotation is basically Annotation for Vocabulary.  While reading a test (AVID Weekly, anyone?), have students circle the words they don't know, underline and draw a line from a word to a student created definition written in the margins, note (with a musical note) any important words, and draw arrows to words that connect in the text.

Dump & Clump - 
I'm pretty sure I've used this strategy at some point, although I don't recall using this name.  It may be related to one of the strategies from the AVID Critical Reading strand.  Give each small group a piece of chart paper, markers, and a topic.  Have the students brain dump words, ideas, etc onto the chart paper individually, then as a group, clump the words and ideas into subtopics.  Finally have the group write a summary sentence for each subtopic.  I think this could be a useful strategy when preparing for a test to activate their prior learning.

Out of Sorts - 
If you ever take a peek into my cabinets, there's no doubt that I'm a huge fan of card sorts.  However, the author talks about using card sorts with more of a word / definition / picture / example matching activity.  One thing I've never done though, is have the students glue or tape their card sort to their notebook, so I will probably try doing that in Geometry.  I think this could be easily adapted to a Desmos card sort as well.

Affix Organizer - 
This graphic organizer is somewhat similar to a Frayer model.  The author intended it as a way to think about prefix / suffix with words that have the same prefix / suffix and to compare those words. In my head, I started thinking about how I could use it more as a graphic organizer such as:

Enriching the Vocab Experience - 
This strategy was a fun little memory test.  Each student gets a blank piece of paper.  The teacher says the first vocabulary word and the students write down related words / ideas, but NOT the actual word.  This allows students to make deeper connections.  After 10 or so words, ask students to flip over their paper and see how many of the original words they can regenerate.  This reminded me of "Taboo" in reverse :)

Frayer Model for Self Reflection - 
This was probably one of my favorite take-away ideas from the entire book and it had nothing to do with the students!  When thinking of vocabulary instruction, most of us are familiar with the traditional Frayer model of Word, Definition, Characteristics, Examples, and Non-Examples.  In Chapter 5, the author challenged teachers to use this model as a structure for self-reflection.  As an example, the author had used the term "Vocabulary Instruction" in the middle spot where we typically would put the word.  Then for the four corners, she asked teachers to self reflect with "Current Habits - When do I teach this? How do I teach this? How often do I teach this?"; "Facts & Characteristics - What strategies do I use to teach this?"; "Examples - Best lessons"; and "Non-Examples - Worst lessons"

Overall impressions:
I'm glad I picked up this book.  It was a quick and easy read, but still provided a lot of food for thought.  I will definitely recommend it to my ELA / AVID colleagues and if I ever have the chance to teach AVID again, I know I will be re-visiting this book! :)

NaBloPoMo - Day 5 - The Tale of Two Classes

It was the best of times... it was the worst of times...  Seriously.

Some background information for today's story:

• I love my membership to ASCD.  Their monthly magazine, Educational Leadership, is simply awesome.  If you are looking for quality professional reading, I highly recommend a subscription to ASCD!
• I am the AVID Coordinator for my school.  Each Wednesday, I send out a WICOR Wednesday strategy to the staff with an instructions on how to implement a classroom best practice strategy.
• My school is on a modified block schedule, where 3 days a week we have a typical 6 period 55 minute day, and the other 2 days are 100 minute block periods and a homeroom class.  Today was a block day.

How much do I love ASCD?  Let me count the ways...
A few nights ago, I realized that November was here and therefore a new Educational Leadership magazine was waiting for me on my iPad.  The theme of this month's issue "Talking and Listening" and I wasn't quite prepared for the goodness that was inside!

One of the first articles was called Speaking Volumes by Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey and I was hooked.  My main goal this year is Student Engagement and for a few years, I've been trying to increase student-led discussion moments in my classroom. 

Some of my favorite quotes from the article:

... productive student talk can help a classroom move from good to great.

The person talking is probably thinking.

 It matters who's talking in class because the amount of talk that students do is correlated with their achievement. 

When students aren't asked to talk and think, well-meaning teachers fill the time with their own speaking.

Talking helps students clarify their understanding, and it helps teachers identify when to intervene.

When students have the opportunity to confront a problem with others, even when they initially fail at the task, they learn something from the experience...

How does that tie in with AVID?
I have been involved with our school's AVID program for years.  I served on the Site Team for a few years, then became an AVID elective teacher for a few years, and I'm currently in my 3rd year serving as our Site Coordinator.  One of my major passions is professional learning, which is part of the reason why I'm so active with #EduRead, doing book studies and other online PD opportunities.  When I became the Site Coordinator, I really wanted to reach out to our staff members and share easy to implement strategies that incorporate Writing, Inquiry, Collaboration, Organization, and Reading (WICOR).  As a result, WICOR Wednesday was born.  Each Wednesday of the school year, I type up a strategy and send it to the staff.  Today's strategy was inspired by the article Talking to Learn, also from this month's issue of Educational Leadership.


Time to tie it all together...
So today started like any other Wednesday... I have my planning period during the 1st block and I spent the first part of my plan typing up and sending out today's WICOR Wednesday strategy.  I used the rest of my planning time to cross a few more things off my to-do list and I also spent a bit of time looking over my lesson plan for today, practicing it in my head, looking at the flow and pacing of the block period. 

It was the worst of times...
My first class of a Wednesday block also happens to be my largest class of 33 students.  I started into my lesson and the first 30 minutes or so were going great.  After that, it went downhill.  I totally ignored everything that I knew to be true from the articles I had *just* re-read earlier this morning and ended up stealing the learning opportunity from my students.  Instead of letting them have the productive struggle that I knew was necessary, I felt myself taking more control and talking more than I should have.  This lack of student thinking really showed its ugly head in the last 20 minutes of class during some independent practice.  Since the students hadn't grappled with the topics on their own, the independent practice turned into a "run around the classroom putting out fires" situation for me.  I was NOT a happy camper by the time class ended and I had no one to blame but myself.. :(

It was the best of times...
My next (and last class) of a Wednesday block happens to be my smallest class of 28 students.  I started my lesson the same as the previous class and again things started out great. This time, though, I gave the students time to grapple with the material, to have the discussions and thinking time needed to "prime the pump" before I started with a mini lecture to solidify the thinking and answer the lingering questions.  I love walking around while students are talking.. I learn so much!  I can find out where my instructions are unclear, I can get a better glimpse into the student's level of understanding, and I watch students gain confidence with the academic language of statistics.  This time, the last 20 minutes was vastly different.  Students jumped into the independent practice time with more confidence, asking good questions of their groupmates, and referring to the appropriate notes without additional prompting from me.

Today held a powerful lesson for me as a teacher and can be summed up in just three words... BE LESS HELPFUL! :)



Today I'm Thankful For:
Dollar Tree!  Anyone that knows me, knows that I love and adore Dollar Tree.  I had a student last year buy me a giftcard to Dollar Tree because she knew I bought a lot of classroom supplies there.  Tonight, I literally went to Dollar Tree to buy paperclips and fully expected to only spend $2, only to walk out with $20 of stuff. :)  I'm a paperclip snob - I like the coated kind and hate the metal ones that snag the paper and I figure that 250 coated paperclips for a dollar is quite worth it.  Of course, that also means I have to walk down the office supply aisle... and then I walked out with 6 new packs of pens... :)  In my defense, 4 of the packs were a set of pens that I have loved for a while, but they stopped selling them at Dollar Tree.  The other two packs were RSVP Fine Point in black ink.  For some reason, those have a tendency to walk off from my desk way too often :(

Thank you Dollar Tree for letting me indulge my pen fetish :)

Summarizing and Thinking Time

One of the books on my to-be-read list is Summarization in Any Subject by Rick Wormeli. This is a book that I've been eyeing for at least a year, so I checked it out from my school's Professional Library in May. Today, hubby and I went to take my dad out for dinner, which gave me a couple of hours roundtrip to skim the book and I'm glad I did! The book claims to have 50 strategies for any subject and while I wasn't equally impressed with all of the strategies, I did find several that I really liked.

One of the things that I have read about a lot lately is the idea of 10:2, which is the concept of every 10 minutes of the lesson/lecture, give students 2 minutes of processing time. I have known of this concept for years, but at my AVID workshop, it hit me again. I'm definitely one that needs my processing time and as a learner, I really appreciate when that time is built into the lesson, but I don't do enough of it as a teacher. I hear people talking about writing in math and when I was in high school, I would have agreed with the nay-sayers, but as a learner now, I see the benefit of writing. When I write, whether on this blog or in the mini-notebook I carry with me, it allows me an avenue to get the random thoughts out of my head and onto paper so that I can organize them into coherent ideas. If I keep them bottled up in my head, I get overwhelmed and lose focus because of all of the jumble of thoughts running and jumping and playing in my head. My notebook looks like a jumbled mess too, but once an idea is down on paper, I can process it and determine the feasibility of the idea.

I still need to go back and read the book in more detail, but here are the notes I jotted down while skimming in the car today:

3-2-1 - This one is a pretty standard summary strategy and I've used it as an exit ticket, but I am including it because I don't think I use it to its full potential. In fact, the other day at Barnes and Noble, I saw one in a book that I was skimming that was 5-4-3-2-1 and it was an end of year reflection/teacher evaluation.

Carousel Brainstorming - I have used this strategy (and the similar Gallery Walk) before but not recently. Funny thing is that I even pinned a few ideas related to this strategy last night/this morning while browsing pinterest for AVID ideas. One of the reasons I haven't used it as much over the past few years is due to the cost of chart paper, which lead to me tweeting out a request for cheap chart paper ideas and Beth (@algebrasfriend) replied about the coloring paper at IKEA which is $5 for 100 feet of 18" wide paper. That made me look at Sam's, which apparently has 1000 feet of butcher paper for $18, so guess where I'm going shopping tomorrow? :) Custom sized posters... charts... banners... OH MY! :)

Inner Outer Circle - Earlier today, @kklaster had tweeted out about Quiz, Quiz, Trade, which is a quick review strategy that I have used before. When I read the section on Inner Outer Circle, it reminded me of a time that I had used it with Algebra 2 and log/exp form. I made flashcards with log form on one side and exp form on the other and had the kids get into concentric circles. They quizzed each other on switching between the two forms, then the circles rotated to a new partner. This past school year, I used QQT for some other ideas but had forgotten the circles part and mass chaos erupted as kids struggled to partner up or stayed with the same person instead of mixing around like they were supposed to. After reading this strategy and thinking/reflecting, I definitely think I will use QQT and Inner/Outer together as it keeps the kids with a structure on partnering and less chaos in general. Now to start working on my QQT cards! (Hoping I can get a set together for #Made4Math tomorrow!)

Learning Logs - This is another strategy that we use extensively in AVID, but I haven't really used it much in my math classes. I want to spend some time developing good Learning Log prompts for AP Stat...

Brain Dump - The book called this Partners A and B, but to me, it was purely a 'brain dump'. This is another strategy I have used in AVID, but not as much in my math classes. This would be a great strategy to use with the 10:2 concept. After about 10-15 minutes of lesson/lecture, let the kids have a brain dump. Often my students are seated in pairs, so designate one of them as person 1 and the other as person 2. Set a timer on your phone for 1 minute and person 1 says everything they can recall from the lesson so far. At the bell, person 2 does the same thing, but tries not to repeat anything that was on person 1's list. When the buzzer goes off again, give 1-2 minutes of writing time for the students to process/summarize the partner talk.

Give One Get One - This is another strategy I've used before, but I like how the book used a 3x3 matrix to collect the responses. In the past, I've done it with post-it notes and the students actually exchanged post-its, but the matrix has so many possibilities for organizing thought or even sequencing. Definitely a modification I plan to steal!

Summary Ball - When I first read this strategy, I thought it was going in the direction of the "write a bunch of questions on a beach ball and toss it around", which is a fun idea and one that I have pinned several times from various blog posts. However, this one had a fun twist of just tossing around the ball and saying something you had learned that day/unit, but if you couldn't think of anything, you had to sit down. I think it would be fun to see how long this could last and I am curious to try it on a quiz/test review day!

The book has 50 total strategies, but these are just a few of the ones that I really liked or have used before. I highly recommend the book and plan to purchase it for my personal library!

Now back to the 10:2 idea. While skimming the book, I tweeted out the following:

I really want to develop a go-to list of ideas that are really quick ideas similar to the ones listed above that I can use as a mini-processing activity. If you have a favorite one, please let me know!

AVID Summer Insititue - Day 3

Day 3 had us in our strands for one last time, then for my site team, we had a "mobile" site team meeting as we drove home from Dallas. :) Here are my notes from today:

We started out talking about how to use the critical reading strategies in a 1:1 classroom. Of course, with tablets, you can pretty much annotate right on them, but with Chromebooks, that would be more challenging.

Yesterday we worked on summarizing, today we looked at Macro and Micro structure of text. I understand the general point of Macro/Micro, but I'm not sure how to apply it to math effectively. With the Micro, the saying/doing activity was interesting but difficult as my idea of what the author is doing was definitely different than an ELA teacher perspective.

One idea I am totally stealing is "Sticker Props". A page of stickers showed up on our table, but it wasn't until later that the presenter shared what they were for. Apparently, when her kids work in groups, she puts a small sheet of stickers in the middle of the table. If a group member has a profound statement or an "a-ha" moment, they get to choose a sticker. I love this idea!

One activity I used as an elective teacher was the "One-Pager". The presenter suggested having students create a One-Pager via Google Draw if you are in a 1:1 environment. Draw is one of the tools of G-Drive that I haven't used, so that may need to be explored soon!

One of my favorite strategies we used today was a pre-reading strategy called Vocabulary Connections. The presenters had chosen 8 vocabulary words from the text and displayed them on the screen. We were asked to create a sentence using as many of the words as we could. I found it fascinating to hear the different sentences and combinations of words from my table-mates. I'm not sure how it would work in most math classes though...

Our final activity of the day was a Socratic Seminar. I've done SS's before, but one new twist that the presenter shared today was charting the conversation. Basically, she drew a circle on her iPad to create a "seating chart" of the circle. Then she drew lines from person to person through the circle to illustrate the conversation. The major benefit was that it allowed her to monitor the conversation and see who dominated the convo, who was quiet, and when two or more people were engaged in a debate.

Now I'm home and the hard work starts... working on our site goals and preparing for the new year!

AVID Summer Institute - Day 2

Day 2 at AVID SI started in our strands at 8am, then after lunch we worked with our site teams. I felt that today was a very productive day overall and I'm very pleased with our progress.

Here are my take-aways from today:

We started the day briefly discussing Cornell Notes, which is a staple of the AVID program. One of the ideas that was shared was regarding the Curve of Forgetting and how C-Notes can help with retention of material. One of the presenters uses a C-notes review as a warmup activity and asks her students to get out their C-Notes from yesterday's lesson/lecture and with an elbow partner, review/revise their notes. This would also be a good time to work on left-column or summarization.

Whenever we have done a quickwrite, one of the presenters always ends the last 10 seconds with "You have 10 seconds left.. finish your last though.. finish your last sentence.. finish your last word... and stop"

We did a Philosophical Chairs activity today, so I tweeted out asking for ideas on using them in math. I haven't had much response yet.. :(

Marking the text in math - I think I want to get into the habit of "circling key terms and underlining claims". In my class, that would be "circling key information" as in the important details of the problem and "underlining the question being asked". I am hoping that if I get my students in the habit of doing this, it will help them tackle new problems and gather the important information.

Modeling is KEY! I realized today that math teachers do a good job in general of modeling our internal dialogue that occurs when we tackle a new problem. However, in our strand, some of the strategies were used with the thought that we already knew what was going on. I understand that teaching children is different than teaching degreed adults, but modeling your expectations is important no matter what the age of your students.

We ended the day talking about summarizing strategies. I don't know how to use that yet, but one idea I had was to have some sort of gallery walk to illustrate different summary sentences of the same paragraph. When we were writing a one sentence summary for a paragraph of test, I was very anxious about whether I did it right. I know there wasn't a right answer, so I think seeing other sample student responses would have helped me to relax a bit.

One of the ideas for teaching summary skills reminded me of an idea from Embedded Formative Assessment. The presenter mentioned giving several samples of summaries and having students rank them by quality. I don't know if I like this idea or not since it can be very subjective...

Tomorrow is Day 3, then home we go! :) Have a great day!

AVID Summer Institute - Day 1

Yesterday afternoon, I loaded up with 9 of my colleagues to make the drive to Dallas for my 7th AVID Summer Institute. Throughout the years, I have been to the Mathematics strands, Elective Teacher strands, Leadership strands, and this year I am really excited to be in the Critical Reading strand. I had several people today look at me funny when I introduced myself as a math teacher in the Critical Reading strand, but I'm really excited to learn strategies that I can use in my classroom!

Taking a note from Sarah H over at MathEqualsLove, I'm going to try to jot myself some notes from today's session so that I can visit it later...

ALL teachers are teachers of reading and writing. This is something that I often forget. For obvious reasons, I identify as a math teacher but honestly, it is part of my job to teach students how to read a math text or how to write a mathematical argument. I need to integrate these skills more often.

One of the first strategies we worked on was marking the text. To be honest, this was NOT a skill I learned in high school or college. If you were to look at my college history books, it looked like a highlighter blew up on the paper because I had no idea how to interact with the text. Once I became an AVID elective teacher, this was a skill that I was required to teach to my students, only we called it annotating at that point. I turned to one of my ELA friends who also taught AVID with me and I'll never forger how she explained it to me. She told me to think of the text as a movie and anytime I got an urge to "nudge" the person beside me and say "OMG, did you see that!!!", then it was something that I needed to underline and write in the margins. If you were to look at my #EduRead archive of articles, you would see evidence of how I interact with text... usually through underlines and margin notes, but sometimes highlighting for something vital. I need to create opportunities for students to interact with text in my classroom. In AP Stat, we often have students read an article or a textbook passage, but I have not taught them how to be an active reader.

Pre-Reading strategies... this is a "duh" moment for me, because I knew that we should always try to activate prior knowledge. However, I never really knew what that meant! Today we did several pre-reading strategies such as the ever popular Quick Write with a relevant prompt, but one of my favorites was a set of "Interview" questions where we paired up and had a short discussion over questions that related to the text we were going to read.

Sentence Starters... OMG, I think this will be a game changer for me! Our presenter gave us a sentence frame that said... "In ____ (title of text), (Name of Authors) _____ (claim, state, argue, or some other verb) that ______." The presenter said that she was dreading grading 100s of sentences that were the same, but she decided to try it anyway. She gave the students a few minutes to complete the sentence, then had them table-share and choose one person to share with the whole class. All of the sentences were different, even though the structure and article were the same. One of the presenter's students exclaimed, "Miss! We sound so smart!!". The presenter's point was this... We expect kids to write academically when they don't know what that looks like. With the sentence frames, we provide structure to help them learn academic writing. Chalk up another DUH moment for me!

As one of the samples from reading in math, we did some graphs... I need to search out good infographics for students to read, notice, wonder, etc :)

One management strategy that I really liked was how the presenter brought us back from a group discussion. In the midst of the chaos of chatting about the task at hand, she would very loudly say, "Back to me in 5...4...3...2....1". It was very effective and I'm eager to try it.

I know I learned a lot more, but those were my major take-aways from today :) Day 2 is tomorrow!

In case you haven't noticed...

... I've been a bit absent on the blog-o-sphere. I know I don't have a ton of readership, but I feel horrible for not blogging and every day that goes by makes it easier to put it off for just one more day. :(

It's been a rough semester and there are 6 weeks left to go. I am having an awesome year in general and I love my classes and students, but 3 preps plus the other supervisory positions that I have are all adding up to too much on my plate. I am ready for this summer, even though it will be just as busy with the AP Reading, AVID training, and TMC14.

But enough whining... I want to talk ramble about #EduRead! :)

This past Wednesday, we met on twitter for a trial run of #EduRead, which is a weekly twitter chat where we read an educational article and discuss it. You can see the transcript and article on the #EduRead blog.

The article was about writing in math class and I really enjoyed it. I am very intimidated by the idea of writing, but I would definitely like to do more. On my drive home this week, I spent some time thinking about how I could incorporate writing in my classroom. I know I really want to do a better job with Exit Tickets next year, so I'm really looking forward to the #EduRead discussion on Exit Tickets on 4/30, but I know I won't be able to read those on a daily basis. I do think that a 3-2-1 on Fridays might be doable, and if it's a quiz/test day, they can do the 3-2-1 on the test/quiz paper. Maybe I need to come up with a 'schedule' for each day of the week so I don't have to do too much thinking about what to do each day.

One of the other things mentioned in the article was a portfolio. Several years ago, I created a "How To" notebook for my AP Stat classes, but I never could make it work the way I wanted to. I think it might be useful for my AP Students to have some sort of portfolio, but I'm at a loss of how to make it work. One of the former AP Calc teachers at my school using to do a "How To" type notebook that actually inspired mine and she loved it for calculus. She gave the students a list of topics, then gave them a prompt to fully answer for each topic. When I tried it, I was very disappointed in the student output, which led to me giving them something to copy down instead of doing it themselves, and I know that's not a good solution either. Of course, now that I'm thinking about it, it reminds me of earlier this week when students were working on some review material. I was so impressed with how they were using their class notebook to go back and look for the information from this fall, so maybe their portfolio is actually their INB? *Mind Blown* If that's the case, maybe I need to incorporate some writing assignments into the INB like the 'clock questions' and the 'parent review page' from some of the AVID training

So... Many... Thoughts...

:)

Cornell Notes in Math Class

A few weeks ago, @lmhenry9 sent out a tweet asking about Cornell Notes in math class. This morning, @aanthonya sent out another request. Since Cornell Notes are a staple in the AVID classroom, I thought I would post a "how to" on using Cornell Notes in a math classroom.

Rationale
If you do a google search on Cornell Notes, you will find pages and pages about the history of Cornell notes, why you should use them, what the benefit is, etc. However, what is harder to find is the down and dirty, how do I do this, what's so special about C-Notes, etc. Honestly, when I first heard of them at the start of my AVID journey, they scared me. I remember sitting in my first AVID summer insitute stressed because I had NO CLUE what they were talking about! Unfortunately, I felt that stress for quite a while because it took time for me to understand that C-Notes weren't as scary or weird as they seemed. They are really just the same notes I had taken for ages in a slightly different format.

Setting up the Page
If you've heard of C-Notes, you've probably realized that there's some formatting that needs to be done. There are C-Note generators online or you might create your own C-Note blackline master (see the one we use in our AVID classes here). However, both of those require you to run off copies, which may not be feasible, depending on your allowed copy count. :)

Enter in the Cornell Notes Bookmark. This is an idea that I got at the AVID training several years ago and I instantly loved the idea because I could have put contact info, important formulas, etc on this bookmark and kids could also use it to draw a straight line down their notebook paper to create their 2-column format. Of course, cutting out 100 of these bookmarks isn't the most fun way to spend the week before school starts in August, so I definitely suggest finding a great TV show to help keep your mind occupied :)

So, now that all the bookmarks are printed on cardstock, cut out and 3-hole punched, kids are ready to start making their notes. Lay the bookmark on top of your notebook paper and use the edge as a guide to create your left/right columns:



C-Notes have 4 main parts. The heading, which is where the name/date/hour/topic information goes, the left and right sides, and the summary area. Some of the newer versions of C-Notes also have an area for the Essential Question (inspired by UbD). Here's the general layout of the page:



Let's take some notes!!
So now that the format of our notes is all done, it's time to take some notes. You'll notice above that the right side of the page is a bit wider. This is the area for the bulk of the notes. The right side is the same type of notes that you've always taken - the fast and furious scribbling of all of the information that you could get down at once. (This is obviously not a student paper - I did it this morning to show you an example)

Right side filled in:


You'll notice that the above picture really looks like a traditional page of notes. The beauty of Cornell really is in the left side. After the notes are taken in class, students are supposed to review the notes within 24 hours and fill in the left side. They are supposed to read over what they wrote on the right side and put short reminders and cues to themselves. You'll see below where I went back and reviewed my notes to fill in the left side.

Left side filled in:


Now if you noticed above, I said "students are supposed to" twice... that means, in my experience this rarely happens :) Typically what happens in my experience is that they fill in the left side as they go with topic changes, subtitles, etc. The beauty of the left side, whether done at the same time or 24 hours later, is that the kids don't need to read ALL of the right side scribbles in order to get the gist of the lesson. They can scan through the left side cue words to refresh their memory or to find something quickly. (This has been a brillant addition to my note-taking during PD as well :) Love being able to quickly scan the left side!)

The final part of the C-Notes is the part my students hate the most. :) The summary section is admittedly the toughest part for students and teachers to do. Again, students are supposed to revisit their notes 24 hours later or so (comes back to that whole "forgetting curve") and write a brief summary of the notes. My students complaint was a valid one... they summarized what the teacher said/wrote on the right side. Then they summarized that again to write their cue/questions on the left side, now they were expected to summarize again at the bottom and they were just summarized out! But kicking and screaming, I recognize that being able to summarize was an essential skill for academic success. To combat some of this, I would sometimes let them do a "tweet" (limiting their response to 140 characters) or a "6 word memoir" of the lesson, which really shows off how much you can say in just a few words.

Summary filled in:


I've taken notes... now what??
I've already shared above my love of the left side. But there are other benefits to C-Notes as well. You can use the left side to predict test questions that the teacher might ask or commonly, use the C-Note format as a study guide. For many of my students, they would work their test review in C-Note format, with the problem on the left side and the work/solution on the right side. Then fold their paper on the line and you have an instant "flashcard" like study system.

Now in case you are thinking - well, that's all fine and good, but I'll never use something like that!, let me leave you with a real-life page of notes that I took at a workshop. You'll notice that I'm just as bad as my kids in the summary section, but look at the benefit of that left side! MUCH easier to scan down the left side to see what I want than to read all that stuff on the right side! :)



Good luck on your C-Note journey!