Note Taking in a Thinking Classroom

By
I came across a thread on twitter a month or so ago.  It was about a professor who discovered that her students had spent all semester collaborating on one large google doc.  They took notes together, asked and answered questions of each other.  It was a great example of collaboration.


And I thought to myself, “I wonder if my students would be willing to try something like that”.  I knew I’d be running a classroom where students were up at the whiteboards daily, working on problems together.  I also realized that this might impact their ability to take coherent notes.

 So, at the start of this semester, I created a mostly blank google doc and shared it with my students.  I provided the first few lesson titles and suggested that they use this space to collect their thoughts about the days activities.

What they created in two short weeks has surpassed all of my expectations.  Over half of my students contribute to making this document, something I hope to improve upon in our second unit.  It was interesting watching how the document evolved and when I made suggestions for improvement I was shocked at how quickly the students addressed that feedback.


I wonder why some students opted to not contribute.  Perhaps the students were not confident in their abilities, so were worried about contributing something that was “wrong”.  Maybe they were more comfortable being consumers, rather than producers.  It will be easy enough to check in with them at the start of Unit 2 and hopefully I can convince them to move out of their comfort zones.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What Are We Reading?

By
Image
Let’s put all the cards on the table before we get into our book list. When we say “reading”, what we really mean is “what pages do we look at after putting the kids to bed”. It’s hard to fit in reading, for professional growth or for fun into a day that is full of work and family. And yet, we try, as we imagine most of you do to. Given the nature of this project, reading for professional growth has become more important to us. For sure we still try to find the time to read for pleasure but that time is shrinking as we get closer to launching The Shift. Certainly, if we are going to be the conduit through which innovative teaching practices are shared we better have some evidence to fall back on. We both started by reading Most Likely to Succeed: Preparing Our Kids for the Innovation Era . This book was the basis for the companion documentary Most Likely to Succeed, which was screened twice last semester in our board. The documentary itself was attended by over 500 Hal...
Read more

What is a Pro-Pro Chart?

By
Image
  If you have been following along on with Shift twitter , you may have witnessed educators getting excited about something called a pro-pro chart.  You may also be wondering what on Earth the excitement is for this tool? A group of HDSB science teachers, led by the Instructional Program Leaders for Science in both elementary and secondary panels, teaching grades 7 to 10 from eight different schools are participating in a series of workshops to learn about Integrative Thinking, which is a creative way to problem solving. It was developed by Roger Martin at Rotman School of Management as tools for businesses to make important management decisions, it quickly became apparent that these tools were enormously useful in education as a way for students to think more deeply about problems in the world around them.   Rotman I-THINK tools are accessible to students in elementary and secondary and be can used to build empathy through tackling some really tricky problems and a...
Read more

Asking Questions

By
Image
“What do you want to learn?” “How do you want to show me what you’ve learned?” These are the questions we hear being asked on our visit to Aldershot High School.  We are sitting in Sarah Spencer's’ Grade Nine Applied Science class.  The students have just returned from a scavenger hunt in a nearby ravine and  they’ve been asked to record some of the things they’ve noticed on the blackboard.  From here, the teacher hands out the Overall Expectations for the course and ask the students to pay attention specifically to the Biology portion of the document.   This is the student's introduction to the Biology unit of the class, and it isn’t going the way we would usually expect.  Rather than the teacher guiding the students from topic to topic, the students are being allowed to find their own path.  Each student is identifying their own interests from the Biology curriculum and, presumably, their paths will diverge from here. But we won’t get to ...
Read more