When I started this blog way back – well – last week, I thought I’d be posting a lot on technology and educational leadership.  But here I am again posting about "Lo-Fi" note taking.

A recent post on Lifehack.org pointed me to an older blog post by Michael Hyatt of Working Smart regarding the "lost art" of note taking.  I couldn’t help but think of our students when I read item number 1 on his list:

Note-taking enables you to stay engaged. The real benefit is not what happens after the meeting but during the meeting itself. If I don’t take notes, my mind wanders. I daydream. As they say, “the lights are on, but no one is home.” However, when I take notes, I find that I stay more alert, focused, and actively involved. My contribution to the meeting is thus more likely to add value to the topic under discussion. This is why I take notes even if someone is officially taking minutes.

Wow.  Note-taking to stay engaged.  What immediately struck me was how many of our kids are disengaged precisely because they are "taking notes."  There’s a reason for the quotes.  To many of our kids, the "note-taking" they do in school does little to prepare them for the real world precisely because most of them have had little or no preparation in how to take notes.

Copying text from an overhead is what many of our students have been trained to think of as "note-taking."  As I see it, it is an exercise in anxiety for the student who writes slowly and is in a panic that the teacher will move the transparency before he or she is finished copying.  And it is an exercise in boredom for everyone else.  How authentically engaged can that student be with the content?  Some kids are 100% engaged in writing as quickly as possible.  The rest are sitting and figuring out how to pass the time before the teacher slides down the piece of paper they’re using to cover the rest of the notes in order to keep students from "getting ahead."

One of the student teachers in our building this semester was talking to me on Tuesday about a PowerPoint presentation he had used when teaching a social studies class last week.  He was concerned because the students seemed a little confused by exactly what they were supposed to be doing.  Reflecting on the lesson, he arrived at the conclusion that a certain proportion of the students sat and watched as if they were watching a television show or a movie at the theater, while another group treated PowerPoint slides as high-tech overhead transparencies and spent the entire time trying to copy the slides word-for-word.

It comes back to teaching our kids to be consumers of information.  How and when did they get the idea that note-taking meant to copy down everything verbatim?  Our kids need to be able to engage in the lesson instead of being anxiously engaged in trying to capture everything.

Teaching them to critically process and assess all the information they receive through lecture, video, PowerPoint slides, the Internet, and yes, even the occasional overhead transparency, will move them toward becoming intelligent consumers of information.  And before we know it, they will be taking notes to stay engaged.