Summarizing and Note Taking - Danielle Pauley

I started teaching my unit on the body systems about two weeks ago. In this unit students took a lot of notes because as we all know, the human body is sophisticated and has a lot of details. So, for the purposes of this unit I used Marzano's note taking strategy. Since we were more than halfway through the semester when I started my clinical, I did not feel that the students needed a lesson on how to take notes. From observing my clinical teacher, I could tell that her students knew how to take notes. However, I did try to follow Marzano's rules for the strategy. The two rules I found most important were "notes should be used as study guides for tests" and "the more notes that are taken, the better" (Marzano, 2001, p. 44). When I was giving my students notes, I used the whiteboard to write down the most important information for each lesson. The students took notes on the important information. This was vital because the information that I wrote on the board was information that would be on their test. This allowed students to use their notes as a study guide for the test. When I was writing information on the whiteboard, a lot of the students complained that it was a lot of notes. Marzano (2001) states "the more notes that are taken, the better" (p. 44). Of course, I know there should be a limit to the amount of notes. However, I knew that I had not crossed that limit with the notes and assured the students that it was to their benefit that they had the notes.