In my Last Post I talked about ditching Interactve Notebooks in favor of binders and Cornell Notes. I used to be a teacher who cringed at the thought of using binders at all. Notebooks seemed so much... neater. Until you factor in all of the glue that you have to use. Do you know how many pages in a composition notebook can become stuck together if you use enough glue? The answer is ...all of them. All the pages.
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So when I began my mission to end my relationship with Interactive Notebooks, I knew that I had to have something more effective and time-efficient to replace them. Part of my school's School Improvement Plan the last several years has included the use of Cornell Notes, and I have seen some classrooms that use them, and it was lost on me what was so terrific about them. What I saw was teachers handing students printed sheets with questions in the left column, and lines on the right for them to answer the questions. These are text-based questions, so students have to essentially hunt for the answers in the book.
How in the world can I teach concepts related to my ELA classroom this way? There certainly is a lot of room in the Language Arts classroom for students to answer text-based questions, but that is only one part of the equation! How can I provide my students with effective notes on the big concepts - theme, central idea, context clues, word parts...?
There had to be more to Cornell Notes than simply reformatting the question-and-answer-from-the-text snoozefest of yesteryear.
And there is.
It turns out, Cornell Notes are actually totally awesome! Once I realized how they worked, I was hooked! I started creating one-pagers for all of our Florida ELA Standards right away.
Cornell Notes pages are divided into three sections. There is a left-hand column, a slightly larger right-hand column, and a section along the bottom of the page. I created a template for this (seen to the left) which you can download here (for free) that also includes a section at the top for students to include the Standards/Learning Targets/Goals/Objectives/Essential Questions.
The left-hand column is intended to be a "cue column." This section should include vocabulary terms, key words and phrases, and potential exam questions (this is my favorite one! Using question-stems, you can provide students with sample questions that might mirror what they'd see on a state exam! This can be helpful when having students dissect questions in prep for testing - I wrote a post about this last week!) Essentially, this column would contain the "what," "who," "when," and "where" information.
The right-hand column is the note-taking column. This is where students take notes during a lesson or in-class. In this section students would include the main points, graphs, charts, bullet points, etc. This section is where the "meat" of the lesson would go.
The bottom section is for summarizing after the lesson is complete. This is a sort of student reflection zone where they can sum up the lesson in their own words. This process helps solidify their understanding of the concepts.
In my classroom, I provide students with the left and right-hand column information during a lesson because 7th graders haven't acquired the skills to effectively take their own notes, however, the summary box at the bottom is their responsibility after a lesson is over. This can be a home work assignment, an exit-slip assignment, or just something they do in the last 10 minutes of a class period.
By practicing the process of taking Cornell Notes with good models, students will learn what good notes should look like and they will be familiar with the process for the future.
Encourage students to draw diagrams or pictures to represent their notes. Encourage them to use different colors and to be creative Cornell Notes don't have to be rigid and boring!
At the beginning of each lesson, we create a Cornell Notes page. These should be no more than one page! Be succinct. If you try to give students multiple pages of notes at once, you will lost their attention completely. Students put their Cornell Notes pages in a sleeve protector that serves as the section divider for that particular standard or skill. Any work/questions/articles/etc. that I pair with that lesson goes behind that Cornell Notes page to serve as examples of how that skill is used.
Many standards have to be broken down into multiple skills, so one standard may have multiple Cornell Notes pages, but of course, you would not teach Chronological Order and Compare and Contrast in the same day or at the same time, even though they both sit under the umbrella of "text structures" within the standards. In fact, I have found that chunking content is much easier when using Cornell Notes and standards can be broken down better into individual skills/components.
Below are photos of some of the Cornell Notes pages that I have created this spring for the standards that I use in my classroom. These are an upgrade from my original ones, but as I get better at using Cornell Notes myself, my own notes get better.
These are one-pagers that include the standard and skill at the top of each page and my own summary at the bottom. When students are learning how to take Cornell Notes, I show them my own summary as a model until they are more comfortable with the process of summarizing their own notes. Eventually, students should be able to complete their own summaries from the notes that they are given.
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