Teacher Tip Tuesday—9 November 2010

The Power of the Notebook

You’ve probably noticed by now that I loathe busy work. I hated it as a kid and I hated it as a teacher. It drove me nuts to see colleagues assigning busy work then complain about how much they had to grade.
Now, formative work—the work you need to look at to be sure the sweeties are learning—that’s different. You need that from time to time to know who needs more help with what.

Howevvah.

Most of that can be done as spot-checks in class. If you stroll the aisles and really look at the work they’re doing, you can kneel down and stop a problem before it gets ingrained. Much better for you and especially for the kiddos.

But notebooks. Ah, they were my savior. They rescued me from the potential stacks of paper that would have surrounded my desk and suffocated me.

Here’s how they work:

• Everyone needs a spiral notebook (has to be spiral—you don’t want pages that can fall out and students aren’t allowed to rip pages out either).
• Everyone starts class always by putting the date on the page they’re open to.
• As the class does what it does, they use the notebook for notes, for questions, for answers, for journal prompts, for chapter notes for… you get the point.
• I had kids do their Quotes, Notes and Thoughts in there every night (more on that in a future post) so at the start of class I’d walk the rows, putting a stamp* at the bottom of their reading notes from the night before. This tagged where they’d gotten to by the time class started. This becomes important later.
• On a regular basis (every 3-4 weeks) I collected the notebooks and flipped through them.
• I knew how many days of QNT’s they should have, what days I had them take formal notes, what days we had videos or PowerPoints, what days we had speakers or group work. Basically, I knew how much they should have in their notebooks—and scored them accordingly. I did not take off points for spelling/grammar, but the notebooks did have to be legible. Rarely (but it happened) did someone lose points because I couldn’t read anything in their notebook. They also had to have the date on each page to get full credit. The longer I did this the faster I got because I knew what I was looking for. I also got to know my kids and could tell if they were lost, confused, having a bad day, or really were into a certain book or topic. I planned days with speakers or videos or essay tests or sustained creative writing for collection and scoring of notebooks.

Why was this effective?

• Well, first, it got the day-to-day paperwork off of me and onto the students (where it should be). I had more time to plan and research and workshop and tutor, and they had a running journal of everything we did in class. I also had a record of how well they were doing their homework and group work (the stamps! I always put them after the last word on the page, so if there was writing after that, I knew the student had added more after class).
• From time to time I’d have them review what was in their notebook, see if their questions had been answered or if new ones cropped up.
• It gave them a safe place to ask questions. I answered back when I scored the books.
• Students also had a certain amount of privacy. If there was a journal prompt they wrote that they really didn’t want me to see, they could fold the page over, put a note on it (“journal prompt—private—Nov 9”) and I respected that (um, that’s important, that respect thing).
• It gave them a place to keep track of group work. Instead of a “note taker” who wrote down the discussions and handed it to me (waste!) they each had their own notes which they could review and use. Again, I would walk around and put a stamp on their pages to note how far they got during class.
• When it came time to write essays, they had all their notes in their own notebooks. Easy for review, for finding quotations they’d liked and could use, and they had a clear track record of what had interested them in the book—this made picking essay topics easy (e.g., wow, I have a lot of notes about characterization. Maybe I should write about Chillingworth…).
• Their writing process stayed in one place and no pages got lost. I’ll cover this in a future post as well. This is key.

So, what have we learned?

Putting the responsibility of an education on the students is a good thing. They learn more and you have more time to research, plan, work with the kids who need it, and just generally be a good teacher. Kids aren’t stupid. Explain why you do what you do (I spent the first few days reinforcing the genius of the notebook) and when they understand why it’s a good plan, they’ll do it.

If only adults were as smart…

* My master teacher while I was student teaching was a fan of rubber stamps and I followed in her (genius!) footsteps. Yeah, high school students in NYC might look tough and all, but they’re a sucker for a little blue dolphin stamp on their papers.