Funny Things Happen When You Sit Still

Holding down the lunch fort at circulation and taking time to read Classroom Instruction That Works by Robert Marzano, et al. especially Chapter 3: Summarizing and Note Taking and trying to think of a way to help myself and fellow media colleagues more effectively use Marzano's research along with steps 3-5 of Eisenberg and Berkowitz's Big Six as we help students and our learning communities at large with their information needs.

I have been giving students pre-marked 5 x 7 note cards with the writing area divided into two sections--one area for notes and the rest for crediting the source. I ask them to assign a category to each note card on the unlined side, so that as they use resources they can organize the information according to where it will fit later when they are sharing what they have learned. The lack of space discourages the frenzy of copying that usually commences when I ask them to make notes.

For my older students, I am experimenting with using PowerPoint slides with a title bar for the category and two text boxes--one for the note(s) in 40 point font, one for crediting the source. When students finish their notes, they can pull up their slides, decide to paraphrase or quote, then insert the information into their learning products.

What I see over and over again with both of these approaches is the need to reinforce note taking by showing students how I would decide where in the source to look for information and how I determine which pieces of information to record. My targeted students are easy to locate--they are the ones who look rather like a duck that keeps diving after bread crumbs all the while looking to see if there are more bread crumbs in another part of the pond.