MisCornceptions

MisCornceptions

What People Don’t Get About Cornell Notes

I have a confession to make. For the first few years after my school adopted AVID, I hated Cornell Notes. I just didn’t see the point of them. All this hoopla over a two-column sheet of paper seemed overdone and ridiculous. And stupid. That’s right. I thought Cornell Notes were stupid.  

Since that time, however, I’ve grown in my knowledge and understanding of the AVID Focused Note-taking system and, now that I comprehend the “why” of Cornell Notes, I have become quite a fan.

Perhaps there are a few of you who are like I used to be--skeptical of the effectiveness of this note-taking style AVID has so enthusiastically championed. You’re the target audience for this week’s Wednesday WICOR. I hope to address some of the common misCornceptions about Cornell Notes and help you see how your students can benefit from using this brain-based system for studying and learning.

MisCornception #1: Cornell Notes are more about the format than about the thinking involved.    

There’s nothing magical about the piece of paper a student uses to write Cornell Notes. In fact, a student could create similarly effective notes using a number of formats as long as the process used for note-taking remains intact. This process consists of several steps: 1. Setup: The student sets up the notes with a topic and an essential question (usually provided by the teacher). 2. Note-taking: The students takes notes over the reading, lecture, video, or other input in whatever style they prefer. 3. Revising: “To revise” literally means “to look again,” and this stage is when the student looks again at the notes with a critical eye to make better sense of them. The student returns to the notes to organize, to edit, to emphasize important ideas, to add missing information, to clarify, to delete extraneous information, and perhaps to color-code or highlight. During this stage, the student may revisit the notes multiple times for different purposes, and one of those visits may include “chunking” the notes, dividing them into logical segments or sections based on content and organization. 4. Questioning: Students create thoughtful questions about each chunk of their notes that require them to process information at a higher level. Depending on the student’s mastery of the topic, the questions may target points of confusion or gaps in understanding, or they may take the students into deeper levels of inquiry about the topic of the notes. AVID suggests using Costa’s Levels of Thinking to guide the creation of Level 2 and 3 questions for the notes. Students can spend time collaborating with classmates or study groups to explore the questions they pose.  5. Summarizing:  The final stage asks students to create succinct summaries of the notes, which requires them to sift out the the most important information from the notes to arrive at an understanding of the big picture. Most of the time, the summary will answer the essential question they have written at the top of their notes and will include some information from each chunk of the notes.   

  

The steps listed are a part of effective studying regardless of the type of notes a student takes. Because of the way they are set up, Cornell Notes provide a ready-made template that facilitates this multi-stage approach to studying.

MisCornception #2: The best thing about Cornell Notes is that students can fold back the left column of the paper and use the sheet to study.  

The teacher who first introduced Cornell Notes to me was absolutely giddy at the idea that her students could fold back the left side of the page and--with the notes on one side of the paper and the questions on the other--quiz themselves about the content of the notes, flipping the page over to check for understanding as they studied. I remember thinking to myself, “If the students have Level 1 comprehension questions on the paper that are answerable in the notes themselves, wouldn’t it be more efficient and just as easy to make flashcards instead of Cornell Notes?”

What that teacher and I didn’t understand is the theory behind Cornell Notes. A German researcher named Hermann Ebbinghaus in 1885 found that our brain is highly adept at forgetting information. He developed a theory known as the Curve of Forgetting that showed that newly information disappears from our brains rapidly unless we do something to stop that from happening. The two main ways to thwart forgetting are to do something meaningful with the information and to revisit the information repeatedly. That’s what Cornell Notes are designed to do; they encourage students to create memorable, thoughtful notes of their own and then to interact with them multiple times as they revise, chunk, create questions, and summarize. The fold-the-flap Cornell Notes study method does address the repetition feature necessary for long-term remembering of information, but it ignores the rest of the procedure.    

MisCornception #3: Note-takers complete the question column and the notes section at the same time.

In order for the process above to work, students complete the notes on the right side, revise those notes, and THEN write questions. If these things happen simultaneously, there’s no chance for students to experience the repetition and variety of thinking processes necessary to make Cornell Notes work as a study tool.

MisCornception #4: The teacher needs to provide guiding questions for the left column.

If you do this, you are depriving your students of the chance to interact meaningfully with the content on their own. I’ve seen teachers who ignore the question part of the notes completely, and instead tell their students the topic heading to write in that space in the left column. The result is a nicely organized page of notes that does not prompt students to do any further thinking. This keeps the learning firmly grounded in the lower levels of Costa’s or Bloom’s. A better approach is to include these subject headings within the notes themselves on the right side of the page. Or, if you love the idea of headings floating out to the side, add an additional column for the headings, and make your Cornell Notes three-column notes that still allow students to follow up the note-taking with questioning.   

MisCornception #5: The answers to the questions on the left side of the page should be answered in the notes on the right side.

The goal of the questions is to push students to think at higher levels about the content: to compare and contrast, to make inferences, to evaluate, to predict, to draw conclusions. If the questions are answered in the notes themselves, the learning is Costa’s Level 1. While this may be desirable for emerging learners struggling to grasp onto the concepts, it’s not ideal for most kids. Higher-level questions lead to higher-level thinking, higher-level engagement, and higher-level understanding.

MisCornception #6:  Cornell Notes restrict my students to one style of note-taking.

Not at all! There’s no one correct way or preferred method to take the notes on the right side of the page. Some students like formal outlines while others prefer bullet points or even mind maps with drawings. Hand-drawn or pasted-in diagrams and figures can appear in the notes, too. Some pre-printed versions of Cornell Notes have lines to write on in the note-taking area; others are unlined for students whose notes are less linear. The type of notes is not what’s important in Cornell Notes; what you do with the notes is what matters.

MisCornception #7:  Cornell Notes are the panacea for all my students’ study issues.

Simply using the format of Cornell Notes is not going to turn your students into scholars overnight. Teaching and modeling how to take notes effectively, how to revise the notes with meaning in mind, how to write worthwhile questions, how to compose a clear and precise summary, and how to use the notes as a study tool will nudge your students in the right direction. As they continue to practice and refine the process, you and your students will see results.  

MisCornception #8: The important things about the notes are their appearance and how many pages of notes the students take.

Pretty notes are useless notes. And more is not always better. To engage in the Focused Note-taking Process, students are going to mess up their notes by crossing out, circling, underlining, adding new ideas, and inserting sketches and symbols. The result may look a little sloppy. Not every student will take the same number of notes, either. Some students will need to be continually prompted and encouraged to write more, yet others will succumb to the perfectionist method of writing everything down and leaving nothing out. If you must take a grade on the notes, grade the evidence of learning rather than the number of notes or pages.

If I’ve done my job here, I’ve convinced at least a few of you haters that Cornell Notes deserve a second chance. They’re not just some cultish AVID thing; they’re a format to help your students develop research-tested habits for effective learning and studying. They’re versatile, interactive, brain-based, and less painful than you initially imagined.

The WICOR of Reading: Reading and Writing

Writing is an essential component of WICOR and a good way to reinforce the skills we're trying to teach our students who encounter struggles with reading.

This week, I turn my attention to the relationship between reading and writing and showcase a few ready-to-use strategies that can help you achieve success with challenging texts in your classroom. 

1.  Cornell Notes:  Cornell Notes are a cornerstone of the AVID classroom, not because there's anything magical about the two-column notes themselves but because they help students understand the kind of thinking required for learning. When you ask your students to take notes in the right column of Cornell Notes, you want them to record the main ideas and supporting points in the text. This aids with meaning-making; students have to sort through the text to sift the main points out of all those words and succinctly summarize them in note form. The most helpful teachers will provide students with an Essential Question to guide their reading or even a reading prompt. After the note taking occurs, ask students to enter the note making phase of the Cornell Note-taking process in which they revisit their notes, highlighting, underlining, or circling main points and key terms, crossing out information that turned out to be irrelevant or unnecessary, and chunking the notes into sections. Then, ask them to write some questions in the left margin, preferably higher-level thinking questions using Costa's Levels of Thinking or your taxonomy of choice. Students can spend some time discussing those questions in pairs or small groups or using the questions to guide a full-class discussion or Socratic Seminar. Finally, conclude the process by asking students to synthesize their thinking at the bottom of the page in a summary that answers the Essential Question. This multi-step process requires students to revisit the text at different cognitive levels and helps the learning stick. By jumping through these hoops, students have made friends with the text and can use their new-found learning for whatever the next part of your curriculum requires. 

2.  Metacognitive Reflection:  In my last post, I addressed the idea of explicitly teaching students the things that good readers do. One way to make these processes become routine practices for your students is to ask them to reflect on the thinking that went into their reading of a text. How did they approach the process? Where did they encounter difficulties?  What did they do when they realized that understanding was breaking down? Asking students to reflect in writing about the process of the reading itself is challenging for them but can lead to fruitful discussion--full-class or one-on-one--on the "how" of reading. By making students aware of their thinking, you can cause real change in their reading behaviors, and perhaps the next reading assignment will seem less daunting.  

3.  Quickwrites:  I'm a big fan of using ungraded quickwrites at every stage of the reading process. Sometimes, I find it's useful to have students write about what they already know or want to know about a topic before they read. Or pose a question that piques their interest on the topic and whets their anticipation to know more. I've also used quickwrites during reading, asking students to stop in the middle of an article, chapter, or fictional text to write about what they already know, what questions they have, and what they anticipate they will discover as they continue reading. After reading, quickwrites are a handy tool to help students clarify their thinking about a topic before discussing it with others. As the name implies, these writings should only take a few minutes, and grammar, spelling, and all those other English teacher concerns aren't important. The purpose of the quickwrite is to generate thinking and get students' ideas down on paper. I've also found that routine quickwriting helps students get used to writing on demand; consequently, the ideas flow much more easily later on when they're asked to share their thoughts in writing on a standardized test or other on-demand essay later on.

4.  Annotation: Teaching students how to annotate a text--whether informational or literary--requires the students to write. Frequently, students think that marking a text only requires underlining, highlighting, or circling words and phrases. The teacher who wants to make big strides helps the students understand that the real power of annotation lies in the comments, questions, and thoughts you jot in the margins as you read. Teach your students how to annotate thoughtfully, and you will see their comprehension skills soar.

5.  Gist Summaries:  Summarizing is a notoriously difficult skill for learners. Ask any fifth grader to tell you about a movie she just watched, and you'll likely hear a scene-by-scene rehashing rather than the succinct summary you hoped for. One method I've found helpful is the Gist Summary. After reading, ask students--individually or in pairs--to sum up the main idea of the text in 25 words or fewer. Sometimes, it's helpful to brainstorm key words as a class prior to writing the summary to give struggling students a word bank of important points to add to the summary. 

6.  Learning Logs:  Learning logs combine summary and reflection. After reading, ask students to explain what they've learned, how they learned it, and why it's important. It's a more formalized version of the quickwrite or metacognitive reflection mentioned above. I've seen two-column learning logs with "what I learned" and "what I thought about it" on the two sides. I've also seen logs that look like journal entries. The format is up to you. The thinking is what's important. 

7.  Exit Cards:  Formative assessments like exit cards allow you to monitor effectively whether your students are "getting" the reading you're asking them to do. If students are spending class reading, ask them to write a three-sentence summary or a gist statement as a ticket out of class when the bell rings. You can stand at the door and collect them. It'll only take a moment to flip through the exit cards to determine whether students understand the reading or whether more discussion and debriefing is needed tomorrow. 

8.  KWL:  One more prior-to-reading strategy for informational texts is to create a three-column chart called a KWL.  In the left column, students write what they already Know about the topic. The middle column is where they write what they Want to know about the topic. And the right column is where they will write what they Learned about the subject from the reading. I recently saw a variation on this: a two-column chart with "Know" on the left and "Questions I have about the topic" on the right. Both types of charts help students activate prior knowledge, develop anticipation for the reading, and prepare them to dive into the text with a learning mindset.   

From the list above, just a smattering of many possibilities, you can see that writing can be one of your best allies in helping your students process challenging text.

Next time, I'll examine how inquiry (the I in WICOR) can be equally helpful.