From Copying to Connecting: How My Students Rethink Note-Taking
How do your students take notes?
In my classroom, we’ve been using a two-column note-taking system that helps students move beyond simply copying information. On the left side, they record notes from a short lecture or a hallway walk. On the right side, they engage with those notes — analyzing examples I provide or finding their own connections to the new terms.
For this particular lesson, students copied definitions for different types of supporting evidence, highlighted the key words, and then cut and sorted examples from a reading we had completed the previous week. What started as a simple sorting task turned into thoughtful conversations about how evidence functions within an argument.
Once students correctly sorted their examples, they taped them into their notebooks and flipped the paper to analyze the effect of each type of evidence on the writer’s overall argument. What I love about this approach is that note-taking became an active learning process, not just a record of information.
Kelly Virgin is a WCWP teacher leader who teaches high school English for the Kennett Consolidated School District.
write.share.connect 