Webster Takes Notes
Noriko Nakada
“Are we doing Cornell Notes again?” a seventh grader in Ms. Huffman’s class asks. “I’ve been doing those all day.”
When I hear this during a sixth period science class, I have to smile. This is precisely what we want to hear from our Webster students at the end of the day.
Several of the teachers at Daniel Webster Middle School have used Cornell Notes in the past, but this year, after several teachers and Principal Wallace attended AVID training (Advancement Via Individual Determination), the entire school adopted the note-taking strategy.
During our Buy Back days, four former Webster students modeled the strategy with the faculty and explained how using Cornell Notes made them better students. Then teachers and staff practiced taking notes on numerous district memos and bulletins. Those two hours of professional development started the buzz and once the students poured back into classrooms, teachers put Cornell Notes into action.
This structured note-taking system helps students take ownership of their own learning by following three steps.
First, students write notes from classroom lectures and readings on the right-hand side of their paper.
Then, on the left hand side, they write questions about the content. Students are encouraged to come up with level one, two and three questions. These three levels correspond with the levels of questioning in Bloom's taxonomy.With Cornell Notes questioning, eighth grade history students don't only explain the Boston Massacre, but ask whether the event was a massacre or if the British soldiers acted in self-defense. Sixth grade science students name the layers of the earth and then consider how these layers impact California.
Finally, students write a summary of their most important learning.
It's the first year most of us have used Cornell Notes, so sometimes we aren't sure if a student question really belongs at level two; we are trying to gage how much scaffolding we need to provide before students construct complete the notes independently.
But we will all get better at Cornell Notes as the year goes on, and hopefully by the end of the year students won't even notice that they've taken Cornell Notes all day long.
For more information on Cornell Notes, check out the teacher resources on the AVID website. <