Jeremy Blake-Summarizing and Notetaking

My clinical teacher is a first year teacher. She works hard, but I found myself worrying about her reliance on the textbook for almost the entire lesson. Students are made to either get into groups or read passages aloud. This bothered me a first. However, I found that though I do not like this kind of reading as a lesson, the teacher was using a lot of notetaking and summarizing strategies as she had the students read.

During the readings, she often has the students stop and answer questions. Sometimes these are simple questions such as a definition, but at the end of a section, she asks questions that make students summarize what they have read and return it in a new form. I do not know if she has taught them how to do this, but they seem to quickly understand how to take parts of the reading a put them together in order to create a valid summary of ideas. She does this by asking how and why questions that pertain to either the reading or how to make the reading applicable to the students' lives.

Also, she uses a kind of team note-taking. The students to not automatically take their notebooks out for notes, but when prompted, they get out their notebooks and talk over the material with the teacher. She then helps the organize the material and put it on the board so that the students can take consistent notes. I think this is a good stopover to individual notetaking since students are reorganizing the information as a group, then writing it down.