Another way that students can help themselves understand and organize their thoughts around the text is to use a double-entry diary. Students can crease a simple lined piece of paper and organize it into two categories: 1) quote from the text and 2) and connections to the quote. Or student can organize it as: 1) quotes from the text 2) and questions that they have about the text. There is also a quad-entry diary. This is also like a word diagram that I use to use in my class for vocabulary. The students are to split up a lined piece of paper into four squares and the first square is for the definition, second square for a synonym, third square for a sentence using the word and the fourth square would be for a picture describing the word. The way that Tovani (2004) sets up a quad-entry is much like a KWL (Know-Want to learn-Learned). One example that she give (Tovani, 82) is with Algebra. The first column is the property, the second column is a diagram of the property, the third column is what you know about the property and the last column is what questions that you still might have about the property. This is really cool and it can applied to any subject and will help student stay organized. I am sure there are some great templates on the web.
We as educators should always share with our students what works for us to remember text. We just cannot keep the best strategies to ourselves. And what is sad is, at least with me, I did not learn these strategies in high school but rather I learned them from college. Remember, different strategies work for different students. Every student learns different and we should always teach to the individual students. This is what education is all about. Sorry if this sounded like a cliche or a bumper sticker but I think many teacher become complacent and forget why they got into teaching.
I had the same problem in high school. I was not allowed into the "secret club" of how to find relevance in text. I had to learn it the hard way--trial and error. As a teacher, I think aloud to help students understand the way I process things. I encourage students to share their thoughts and processes to help each other as well.
ReplyDeleteI have seen many students that have trouble highlighting. You give them a highlighter and they highlight everthing. I think it is very important that we teach students how to highlight and take notes. I have seen a lot of my friends fail college courses because they were never taught how to take notes.
ReplyDeleteThe picture at the end of your blog post was how I took notes in high school. Kind of crazy when you see it for yourself. I was never taught the proper was to take notes when reading, I guess my teacher just thought that it would come naturally. The different note taking skills you talked about in this post are great and I wish I would have known these in previous years. I especially like the one the has the students fold a sheet of lined paper in half and write quotes from text and questions they have from the text. This allows them to pick out some important quotes and also have them see what questions they have. They can then break up into groups and discuss their questions and find answers to their questions.
ReplyDelete