A Guide to Guided Notes
One of the most effective ways to increase student engagement with videos is also one of the simplest: having students take good notes.
Of course, this is easier said than done! No matter their age, many students need support building this essential skill. However, once they develop it, they'll be able to use it for life.
Providing students with a blank page and telling them to simply write the most important information down can be a recipe for disaster. Too often, this opens the door to one of two extremes: students rewrite the textbook or write little or nothing down. This is because they haven’t been taught how to identify what is important.
For this reason, many Modern Classroom educators create guided notes for their students: note-taking templates that make it easy and efficient for students to write (or type) out the essential information they need. Guided notes keep students engaged, help students retain what they see, and improve students’ academic performance (Intervention in School and Clinic).
This doesn’t mean you need to throw out everything and start from scratch. Guided notes can be graphic, like KWL charts, highly visual in nature like Sketchnotes, or more traditional like Cornell Notes. The feature that makes them helpful to the student is how they are presented, and the structures they exist within.
How do you set students up to take these notes? Have students been adequately prepared by being able to see what they are expected to do? Have you modeled the process for them, or shown them an exemplar? Do they have solid instructions they can reference throughout the note-taking process?
What cues should they be looking for while taking notes? How do you help them to identify important concepts? Are these visual, auditory, or some combination of the two? And will they be able to both take notes and listen at the same time, or can they pause instruction while they write?
In our Guide to Guided Notes, written by active Modern Classrooms teacher and mentor Sarah Moon, we explore this further, along with providing research-based ideas for effective notes templates and examples from Modern Classroom educators who have implemented these practices effectively. Not only can notes like these keep students engaged in your videos, but they can set your students up for long-term academic success.
