My kids are awful note takers. It’s not just me, this is what they are telling me. Each Friday I ask kids to do a 6-question weekly reflection with questions like “This week I took useful notes.” For that item, students all consistently report the lowest scores over the first 4 weeks of the class. It’s clearly the biggest takeaway from doing all of these weekly reflections, so I should probably address it.

Notes were an important takeaway from what I learned when I began looking into the thinking classroom. In the past I didn’t do notes, but I had really well laid out tasks which included everything I want students to take notes on. These tasks would be organized in such away that they could review the important things whenever they studied. The act of deciding what things are important seems like an important academic skill, and by not expecting them to do this meant I was setting them up for failure in higher ed. The meaningful notes that Peter Liljedahl described echoed this:

…teachers can highlight particular parts of the work that is on the boards, but it is important that the students select themselves, and synthesize and reorganize notes on their own.

Unless of course they don’t. I’m not sure why the students aren’t reporting that they are taking notes, but I can assume that my teaching has something to do with it. I usually I rush through the notes at the end of the class, perhaps because I don’t yet stop early to give them to time to write things down. I could write a whole post around my issues with pacing and the thinking classroom (tl;dr version: “how is class over already!!!”), but maybe it would help to give kids some more guidance around the note taking process. Perhaps the reasons they are saying they struggle taking useful notes isn’t because they don’t have time, but that they aren’t used to doing it. I have been giving them some structure so far which you can see in this google doc. On the first class I gave them the just the first page, a note sheet with a few blank lines and said “Write a letter to your future dumber self about what we learned today.” I quickly pivoted to something with more structure. They got a two-page document with a number of important things that the we would cover over the whole course. It had lots of places for kids to put in things that were relevant, and they could do so over the course of the class. What I found was that kids treated it like a worksheet, looking to show me one that was totally filled out (one kid even went and googled some of the new stuff), while others filled out nothing while planning to sort of wait until later when they would “know what to write.” The last page on this is what I made for today.

Download (PDF, 23KB)

Today I decided to make it a point for kids to take notes on an important equation, the vertex form of the quadratic equation, since they will need for the project. I made a note sheet and I had the kids do it after we worked through a bunch of different quadratic equations and graphs on whiteboards. The activity they worked on encouraged them to make connections between tables and equations and we stopped with 15 minutes to allow time for note-taking. Then I handed out the note sheet above and basically told kids “We’re going to take notes now, these are going to be important later, and you can use what you see on the boards to write down the important parts”. This was definitely the best notes they have taken so far, even though some kids kept their paper blank and others wrote things they will not be able to refer to later.

So it wasn’t a complete fix to our problem with note taking, but I’m not taking it personally. It is a new routine, and it is one that contradicts a lot of norms that in the school altogether, as well as messages that the kids are being sent about school and learning. Our school is about experiential learning, so students who choose to come here probably aren’t kids who instinctively look to document things with the future mind. Kids also have some pretty damaging thoughts about how learning and knowledge happen. Ronny, who spent the whole time with a blank paper in front of him, “I already know this, so I don’t need to take notes…the right answer will just come to me later.” What a difficult set of beliefs to set for oneself. Leonardo DaVinci, Martin Luther King, Abaraham Lincoln and all these other genius needed volumes of papers to write their thinking down, but somehow when you get done learning you can skip the notes? We talked some more and he has a lot of reason to believe what he does. He is basically saying that the Regents is the only place where it is important to use what you’ve learned, and in his 11 years of experience, he was able to be successful. This way of thinking doesn’t set up Ronny for success in the future and places an impossible burden on him for when he gets older. If you struggle in college, wouldn’t it be nice to say “my notes are bad” instead of having to say “I guess my brain stopped working”? Seems like some kids don’t think of my class a chance to practice using the effort to become smarter, but as a chance to reinforce the smartness that they already have.

Yesterday I posted about how I began my Thinking Classroom experiment. The experiment actually started in the 2nd week of november, so at this point I’m actually 3 weeks in to it. Today I actually had the best class that I’ve had so far. It wasn’t a perfect class, but it was good enough to make me forget some of those rough days that happened along the way. There is a lot to write about, and I may not get around to it, but I will start with a digression to talk about my randomizer.

The Randomizer

Before my first class I made a randomizer that basically assigned seats to random numbers, and assigned those randomized seats to students. It was basically one that Joel Bezaire described. My school has really unpredictable attendance, however, and also has kids show up late. I needed a randomizer that wouldn’t assume that we would have the whole roster there and be smart enough to take any number of kids each day. Based on the kids in class the sheet should figure out how many pairs are needed, and then assign the random seats. This thing does all that automatically whenever a new kid is inputted into this google form that I have kids fill out (and I can also decide how many kids I want to have in each group).

It works like this. Kids fill out a google form with their names and click sign-in. This also helps me keep track of attendance and lateness. Then as the names come in, the spreadsheet puts today’s group on the right. It also automatically adds more groups as needed, and some blank seats in group “N” in case we need to form a new group. Check it out in the video below.

Bonus: If you use google slides, you can paste the two columns from the spreadsheet into your google slides, then select that you want to “link to the spreadsheet” so it will automatically fetch the new results. This way you can automatically pull up the random seatings by clicking “Update” in the slides and avoid having to even open up the spreadsheet.

This is what my random groupings table looks like in google slides. You can click the ‘update’ button at the top and the table will pull in any new kids that weren’t added before

If you want to try this out without doing the spreadsheet wrangling, I made a version that should be pretty easy to plug your classes into. All you basically need to do is:

1. Make your own sign-in sheet with 3 questions: Name, Period, and “Sign-In” or “Sign-Out”. It should look like this one: Randomizer Sign-In Sheet.
2. When you’ve made your sheet, click on the responses tab and click on the green square that allows you to view a spreadsheet. Make a new spreadsheet and call it whatever your heart desires.
3. Go to the Randomizer Spreadsheet (Here you can see the results of the sign-in sheet, as they come in from the form above, and you can see the results come in.
4. Go to the “Randomizer” tab of the spreadsheet above, and click on little menu on the right, then select the option “Copy to” and choose the sheet that you made in step 2.
5. It should almost be working, There is this one cell on the randomizer that is highlighted in orange that will have an error message. Click inside it, and confirm that it says “=arrayformula(‘Form Responses 1’!A:E)”. [Note: you shouldn’t have to alter anything, you should just have to double click and then press enter.]

So that’s my randomizer, let me know if you think it is useful. I can go more in depth about how it works but I want to say a little bit about why I think the class was better.

Today’s Firsts

Today’s class was a highlighted by a few small firsts. It was the first time that I tried to do a mid-work-time consolidate. This was an idea that I talked to someone about at NCTM Seattle and it was a move that would make a lot of sense. I wanted the kids to work on two sets of visual patterns one linear, and one quadratic, so I wanted to stop after the linear one and make sure everyone felt confident thinking about how we go about describing linear patterns before moving on. Once students got through with the linear set I could consolidate what we’ve all done as a class before moving on to the quadratic set of patterns. I was just about to do this mid lesson consolidation when I decided to roll out another first.

Almost all of the groups were at a linear equation for the first set of visual patterns except for one. This pairing was a girl who had only been in the class once before and another kid with better attendance whose work usually gets presented first and is kind of shy. Both students could use the confidence boost of figuring it out. They explained the equation in words, but somehow got stuck when it came time to write it on the dry erase contact paper that was attached to the storage closet in the back of class. While they were going back and forth about what to say I just sort of drifted away. My attention turned towards the front of the class where the two other groups were sitting idly with their linear equations locked and loaded. They would need to do something while we waited for the big consolidation, so I asked them to do a different problem as they waited, which was a first. For one group, a visual pattern that I had on the board got them immediately engaged. The other group was asked to look around the room at a problem they hadn’t done but others had. (In retrospect, I should have just given that second group the visual pattern as well because I think that group wasn’t as engaged in the consolidation later). In a few minutes we were able to do the halfway consolidation, with all groups feeling confident that they can handle any visual pattern I can throw at them.

All the groups had their confidence tested when they were faced with a non-linear visual pattern, and they were all able to use a recursive strategy and explicit strategy to find further patterns. It was actually pretty impressive seeing the group from the back of class with the most intuitive strategy to figure out what the equation was.

It was a pretty good day, I am not sure how I am going to get the kids who weren’t here (about 1/3 of the class) up to speed on what they missed. Any ideas?