Five notes on note-taking

I’ve got a student whose academics have taken a nose-dive in the last month.  He’s learning from home, and he was a remarkable student from August through January - everything a teacher could ever want from a digital learner.  His family is wonderful, kind, and supportive.  They’ve made several re-arrangements at home to make his circumstances more conducive to focus and concentrate, and they’ve removed some temptations and distractions that they feel take his attention away from classes during the day. We’ve had quite a few calls and conferences to try and get him back on track, and they’ve not only done everything I’ve asked, and they’ve put some of their own expectations for him into practice as well.  After our latest conference, his mother asked me, 

“Do you think it would help if we set aside some time each evening for him to review his notes from class that day?”

Uh-oh.

Notes and I have a complicated relationship.  I think about them a lot, because they’re an expected and normal part of the teaching and learning process.  Even when I taught elementary school, kids expected to take notes and parents expected them, too.  They’re the thread in the fabric of the educational process.

Confession time -  I don’t have students take many.

A few times a year, I’ll have parents bring up having students study their notes like I did in the story I told earlier.  I feel guilty when I have to tell them that their student probably won’t have any to study most days, and when they do, they’ll be short, sweet, basic, and probably disorganized.


If I’m honest, the reason behind that is equal parts strategy and negligence, triumph and shame, guilt and pride.  Sometimes I’m sure I’m doing the right thing, and other times I’m sure I’m short-changing my kids.  As I said, notes and I have a complicated relationship.  I’ve (mostly) made peace with where I stand on notes, but I still think, re-think, and over-think my stance on them frequently.  I think I’ve settled on a few conclusions. 

Here are the five things I’m pretty sure I think about note-taking. 

1 - Notes are for remembering, not for learning

I have a firm policy in my planning that note-taking is forbidden when we’re learning something new.  I actually tell students to put their notebooks away and ban note-taking at some point almost every day.  I don’t think kids (or adults, for that matter) can learn and take notes at the same time.  If I want the kids to learn something, I want them to focus their full attention on it.  I actually even find that even so much as having a pen or pencil in a student’s hand - even without writing - can be too much distraction, and I usually won’t even let them do that.  Learning takes attention.  Attention is difficult to get from kids.  When I want it, I want every little bit I can get, and I’m not willing to share it with any other task.  If I limit the students to focusing on one thing at a time, they can focus on it fully.  

When I’m satisfied that students have learned something, then and only then I’ll consider having them take notes if we have time.  The process of writing them can help commit learning to memory for longer, but only if they actually learned it first.

Notes are also great to have to recall what you learned later.  The process of forgetting begins quickly, and having notes to review, recall, and  re-learn can be one method of mitigating the forgetting process. But again, only if you actually learned the first time.  You can’t recall something you never really learned or understood to begin with.

"I'd better hurry up and figure this out or there's no way he's ever going to let me write anything in my notebook."

I think we’ve all experienced classes in our lives where we came home with pages upon pages of notes that we didn’t understand.  I can still remember being in 10th and 11th grade and having notebooks full of social studies notes that I reviewed over and over and over again before tests. I knew full well at the time, however, that I had no idea what I was reviewing - I just hoped that the notes would burn in my memory and somehow help me on the test.  But they never made sense to me because I never learned the concepts in the first place.  I was reviewing something I didn’t know!

Notes are great for remembering, but they’re not great for learning.

2 - Notes are for the second time.

Imagine for a moment that you’ve never heard the story of The Tortoise and the Hare.  Now imagine that I’m going to tell you the story, and I’m going to ask you to take notes on the story as I tell it, so that you can remember the story later.  If you did that, you would have pages and pages of notes about the hare even though the big point of the story is about the tortoise.  Since you didn’t know where the story was leading, you took a bunch of unnecessary notes along the way.

I think note-taking during the learning process does the same thing.  Since you don’t know where the text or video or lesson is going, you don’t actually know what’s important.  When you see how the whole thing plays out and you have the full story, however, identifying important points is easier.

For me, when I request that students take their own notes, it always comes the second time through something.  If they’re learning from a text, they read it once empty-handed, then take notes when re-reading it a second time.  Same if they’re learning from a video; watch it once just concentrating on it, then re-watch it, taking notes the second time.  That way they have the full story and the important parts are more clear.  When I teach something procedural like a type of math problem or science practice, same thing - notes happen on the second example.  The first time through is just to listen, concentrate, and see where the procedure goes.

​"I'm going to want to remember this whenever he actually let's us take notes."

3 - Note-taking isn’t for everybody

Just like any instructional activity, note-taking is very valuable for some students and not at all valuable for others.  People learn in different ways, and that means a variety of different activities is needed in any class to assure everyone has a chance to learn in his/her ideal manner.  I had classes in high school and college from time to time that centered entirely on note-taking - every class, the whole time. Those classes only served the portion of the class for whom that structure worked, which certainly wasn’t me.  

"FINALLY, he remembered to put note-taking in the lesson plan for once."

However, I probably err too far the other way, offering students too few opportunities to take notes, which leads me to….​

​4 - I think I under-use note-taking as teacher because it doesn’t work for me as a learner

I’m pretty sure the way I teach matches the way I learn.  I’m not a note-taker as a learner, so I have a tendency to under-utilize them as a teacher.  There are likely many things I over-do and under-do for the same reasons.  To some extent, this is unavoidable in any classroom. It is definitely something to be aware of, however.  Going back to #3, if we as teachers limit our teaching to only our own preferred ways of learning, we’re leaving a huge portion of our learners in the dust.  Personally, I have to make note-taking an explicit priority in my instruction or it won’t happen at all.  Even knowing this, it remains a weakness in my teaching practice.

5 - Making assessments open-note has two big benefits

This year, I’ve been forced to make my assessments open-note.  I can’t really prevent my at-home students from using notes (or Google, or math-cheating apps), so I allow my in-school students to use them as well.  I’ve seen two big benefits to this.

First, it incentivizes good note-taking.  An open-note policy only helps the students who actually take notes when they’re supposed to, and I’ve seen some students catch on to that and do a better job with it.
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Second, it forces me to make assessments that can’t be taken by simply repeating low-level knowledge back to me.  Rather than asking questions that can be answered right out of a notebook (or off of a Google search or using a math-cheating app), I’m crafting questions that require genuine understanding.  We say all the time that, in the modern age, there’s no sense in having students memorize something they could just Google.  An open-note policy has helped me make sure my teaching and assessing reflect that.

"That moment when your notebook has JUST the example you need."

So there you have it.  With apologies to my student whose parents are about to require him to review his notes every day, this is the full extent of my over-thinking about note-taking.  Hopefully one day I'll strike the proper balance.  In the mean time, what are your thoughts?  Add a comment and contribute to the conversation!
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