taking notes

Your post brings back memories of my time in college when I used to try to remember what my professors were saying. I was the type of student who could make her way through the course while trying to take notes on every detail and explanation the lecturers provided. To my surprise, there wasn’t a single day that we had a session that demonstrated how to take notes or, at the very least, highlight the most important information while the lessons are being taught. As a result, I never wanted to make a point without writing it down so that I could refer to it afterwards. Knowing how to take notes or summarize is a terrific idea to help you separate out the information that is crucial from the rest. Could have I had a lesson on note-taking; I could have stood a chance to effectively sort information while avoiding the struggle of writing word for word.

I loved the rules you outlined regarding summarizing strategies, especially those including identifying points that are not important and finding a topic sentence. I also liked the summary frames where you give different types and their respective descriptions to provide insights into how summary should be done; in particular, I loved the definition frame where student need to recognize the varied items discussed and their definitions while putting them into different categories. Besides, I liked how you gave illustrations on nota taking pertinent to the shapes such as a circle and triangle.

In this case, I think this type of taking notes, using the shapes might be in context with students in lower grades; however, it might be challenging as they have varied learning potentials and presenting different writing levels (Chang & Ku, 2015). I remember assigning students an article to make notes and noted that they had challenges due to difficulties in identifying the important points while discarding irrelevant ones. In essence, if these students could know how to make notes using shapes as you illustrated, it could be easier for them.

Reference

Chang, W., & Ku, Y. (2015). The Effects of Note-Taking Skills Instruction on Elementary Students’ Reading. Journal Of Educational Research, 108(4), 278-291.