I think that I've decided to make this Cornell Notes business a whole series because it has gotten so much attention. I am blown away by the feedback about my disenchantment with Interactive Notebooks and how I transitioned to Cornell Notes in my ELA classroom! I had so many people ask so many questions, so I figured that I would start with the most asked question - how I differentiate and use Cornell Notes in instruction! If you keep reading, I will be linking some great examples.
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First of all, I recommend that you read my post about how I use Cornell Notes in my ELA classroom if you have not already. There are some good examples of Cornell Notes and an explanation of how I created my own mentor notes.
In my classroom, I teach two sheltered ESOL classes, meaning that every student in the classroom is an ESOL student. I have a beginning/emerging level group and an intermediate level group. I also teach one group of SPED students in an Intensive Reading and Language Arts block. You can imagine how incredibly important good differentiation is in my situation! (In fact, if you really want to learn how to become strong at differentiating instruction, spend a few years teaching SPED or ESL students!)
Using Cornell Notes was important to me this year, but just as I hated all of the glue, I also hated trying to give students tons of notes to copy. I have students who are attending school for the very first time in their lives and may struggle with forming letters, and SPED students who struggle with fine motor skills and writing is difficult for them. I certainly cannot pop a page full of notes under my doc cam and expect them all to happily copy. This becomes a frustration for them and for me and in the end, no one has clear, concise, and effective notes.
I hate wasted time.
Differentiation is an important part of making lessons comprehensible for every student in the classroom, and when I was a new teacher, it completely confounded me. It was difficult to get every kid on the same page in my classroom in general - forget figuring out how to get them all on the same page using different paths to get there.
I have come to realize that when we are taught to utilize skills or strategies in our classrooms through Professional Development, we are often being shown how to apply things under perfect conditions by folks who are not implementing them in an actual classroom.
So my experience with learning how to differentiate in the classroom was limited to multiple PD's that overwhelmed me and created more questions than answers.
And then I started using Cornell Notes. (Seriously, if you have not read my post about this, please check it out, it's full of information and anecdotes about my epiphany).
Suddenly, differentiating became so incredibly clear.
The problem was that my ESL and SPED students struggled to write an entire page of notes, but I wanted them to have the notes, so I needed a solution! Once I realized what I needed to do, it seemed so obvious and I felt stupid - but sometimes it's difficult to solve a problem when you are so close to it!
Students can take notes without taking all of the notes. Every single word is not important. If I create a template for students that requires them to only fill in the most important information, they are still taking the notes, right? They are following along as we discuss, they are reading my mentor notes page on the board, and they are reading their differentiated version in front of them so they can fill in the information that is missing.
So I took my mentor notes and created a black-and-white fill-in-the-blank version for each page that I can photocopy as many times as I want. Then I can have these pages on-hand for students who struggle with writing lots of information.
This is my mentor page for teaching the text structure Chronological Order. This page would sit under the document camera while I discussed each part of the notes, beginning with the vocabulary terms in the left-hand column.
This is a differentiated version of the same page of notes. Some of the information is not filled in, and there are some blanks where key terms or information would need to be filled in by the student. Notice how the words that are written for them are unimportant words in each sentence or note.
I do not give these differentiated pages to every student in the classroom. Some students are capable of taking an entire page of notes, and some students need to be pushed a little bit with the expectation that they will take those notes. But there is no reason for a student to sit frustrated and struggle through pages of notes all year long.
Many students in the room begin with a blank Cornell Notes page (you can download a blank template for this here).
Notetaking is more effective, our time is better utilized, and students are being met where they are - it's a win for everyone! This method has changed my classroom so much, and we spend so much more time practicing skills than taking notes or gluing crap into notebooks.
If you have any questions or would like to share tips or ideas that have been successful in your own classroom, please do so in the comments! I love to see teachers helping one another become better, more effective teachers :)
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