Teach like a champion 3.0: 63 techniques that put students on the path to college - Lemov Doug 2021

Technique 22: Board = paper
Lesson structures

I have a colleague who can still tell me what we said about each classroom we observed during a series of school visits we made more than a decade ago. I know this because once, several years after the visit, she did exactly that, flipping back through a trusty old spiral notebook until she found the date and heading, thumbing down through a tidy transcription of the salient points about each teacher we'd watched until she found the one we were discussing. “Yes,” she confirmed, “we loved her upbeat, positive tone even then.”

I have another colleague who can flip back through her notes and remind everyone what we decided at a meeting or what we thought of a video we watched eighteenth months ago.

Unlike these colleagues, my own notes are more or less useless to me after I have taken them. I never learned (or, more precisely, never built a habit of using) an intentional system of note-taking. Perhaps teachers in my schools assumed my peers and I knew how to take notes, perhaps they thought it was up to us to figure out, but in school my notes then were a mess of hasty scrawls with little organizational structure. This pattern persists to this day, and I find this weakness to be an enduring drain on my productivity.

Taking notes is a critical but easily overlooked skill that allows students to organize and review material over the long run: across a unit, a semester, or a lifetime. And in the short run—that is, during class when they are actively taking notes—the process can cause students to focus and prioritize their attention.

To state the obvious, note-taking is progressive: a habit that builds over time from a simple model in the primary years to something more complex when students are older. At the elementary level, students should know that “written on the board” means it's important and should be written down by them as well. At the middle school level, they should systematically record the important ideas from the class and differentiate them from less salient points. At the high school level they should leave class with a record of the proceedings that will allow them to study the ideas in depth and with clarity even weeks later.

Perhaps some students do. But too many, likely, will produce haphazard scrawls scattered across the page like I did because the process of learning to make notes is so easily overlooked. Others will not know that if it's on the board it matters. Taking good notes requires and therefore builds attentiveness, and too-brief notes not only will be largely useless later on but also may reflect a fractured state of attention during the lesson. At the other end of the spectrum, some students will try to write everything down and have little attention left to reflect on the ideas from class. They may have little sense for what information was actually important when they return to review. Left uncorrected, each of these untaught note-takers will carry a hidden disadvantage to every classroom they inhabit.

With that in mind, it's worth watching the video Sadie McCleary: Board Equals Paper, a series of moments from Sadie McCleary's Chemistry lesson at Western Guilford High School in Greensboro, North Carolina, in which she guides her students through the process of creating a written record of the day's learning. As the clip opens, Sadie instructs her students to get a page set up for note-taking. She is clearly modeling and practicing a method of note-taking as much as she's seeking to help them master the details of the day's lesson: “You are writing at the top ’Unit 2: Matter,’” she says. “Today's lesson is lesson 14: Combined Gas Law.” The system—with references to units and sequences of lessons—is implicit in the set-up.

After guiding the students through several practice problems, Sadie says, “We're going to write that into our notebook.” Notice the ’we’ language here and throughout—the clip reminds students: What I am doing at the board, you are doing at your desk—all of us are doing this together. You can also see Sadie reach for her own version of a notebook and place it under the LCD projector. She's completing a “worked example”: a high-quality model completed live in front of students in which she comments on the process as she completes it. She models and describes at the same time. It's not trivial that she keeps her own version of a student notebook. At the end she'll have a record of what they have in their notebooks, which Sadie reflects comes in handy to help with absences, lost notebooks, and students in need of study tips. And having a consistent place to take notes is part of the system. She's modeling that, too.

Sadie's pace is stately. “So we'll write P1V1 over T1,” she says, and then leaves a few seconds for students to get that down. “It used to drive me crazy when a teacher said write this down but then was already talking about something else when I was trying to do just that,” recalled my colleague John Costello as we screened this video at our offices. “But she goes slowly. There's time to do what she asks.” In part that's because she is making actual notes live rather than, say, projecting a version she created in advance. This causes her to be doubly attentive to pace—she understands the time that students need for tasks because she's doing them herself. That said, only teachers with strong established class cultures can write while still scanning for follow-through and behavior, so while it's ideal to write along with students, having prewritten notes that you narrate is acceptable if your culture is still developing. It will give you less to manage in your own working memory and let you observe more accurately. Just be sure to go slowly. And work toward the sort of live modeling Sadie uses.

Watching this video as a team, we also noted how important planning was. Having a clear sense of what students should write (and possibly even having written out an exemplar version of their notes beforehand to guide you) will help make the notes organized and thoughtful. If you're figuring out how to structure the notes or what to write in real time, the result is likely to be confusion.⁹ In a later interview Sadie noted how important it is for her to think through in advance exactly what she wants in her notebook. Turns out she keeps two! One she fills out in advance, so she knows what to write. The second she completes along with her students so she can model and describe the process to them in real time.

Throughout the video, you'll also notice how carefully Sadie scans to make sure students feel accountable to follow-through. She is sending the message “I care about you getting this down and I'm watching to make sure you do.” As we discuss in Radar and Be Seen Looking (technique 53) this makes it so much more likely that the students will, in fact, make sure to get every note down. You can see Sadie looking several times and even carefully adjusting the projector at one point to make sure students can see perfectly. The message is This has to be just right so you can all get it down perfectly.

Sadie models a two-part process in which students include both “content' and “commentary” in their notes. She shows them how to write down elements of the lesson and how to mark them up with their own thoughts and reminders. At one point you can see Sadie model for her students how and where to include marginalia and commentary, such as labeling one part of the equation “initial” and adding side notes about how to use the formula: “It must be the same gas” and “No added or removed particles.”

Here's a side note about the video, based on a conversation that came up in our team's screening of the video: How can we prepare students to take notes on laptops in college? One of the most important parts of this video to me is that Sadie is modeling handwritten notes. Recent data¹⁰ has made it pretty clear that handwriting your notes leads to greater recall than typing your notes. You remember more, think more deeply, and are less likely to be distracted by other things that pop up when your laptop is open. The more students work by hand, the better, so I think my response is to prepare students not to take notes on laptops, if possible. I'd be transparent about this, and remind them of the benefits of handwriting their notes—presently and when they get to college and in a university setting.¹¹

Seeing Sadie's work with her high school Chemistry students is powerful, but as I noted before Board = Paper involves “progressive habits that build up from the primary to the university years.” What skills and habits should a classroom reinforce when students are younger?

Begin with the idea that students should know to track what the teacher is writing on the board. When a teacher writes it on the board, it means This is important.¹² Students should know to write it down.

The best way to start students on the path to autonomous note-taking is to make your overhead a mirror image of the graphic organizer you give to students to take notes on. As you fill in a blank, they fill in a corresponding blank. You fill out the projected worksheet on the board and say, “Make your paper look like mine.” Even as students earn more autonomy, having your overhead match the format in which they are taking notes allows you to model what note-taking—one of the most important skills for any student—should look like.

Gradually, students should develop note-taking independence, filling out longer and longer passages of their graphic organizers on their own, before you ultimately ask them to take notes on a separate sheet of paper as Sadie does. But know that it may take time before students are ready to take full responsibility for such a critical piece of the process and that along the way they'll need lots of feedback. At her previous school, Sadie notes, when students got to the point where they were simply taking their own notes without guidance, she used to collect class notes to give them feedback and/or to share exemplars to compare their own notes to.