Johanna Kuiper

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Notes, worksheets, homework. Oh, my. These are three practices of many in the math classroom that need a facelift because the way that they’re being implemented is not effective for student learning. This is going to be the first in a series of hot take episodes. Let’s get started. Welcome to solving for the undefined podcast, I’m your host, Johanna, founder of Miss Kuiper s classroom, the place that equips teachers and creating a healthy math classroom where students can thrive no matter their academic abilities. But it’s not always about the numbers, and that’s why I’m here, bringing you the formulas to solve your problems, math and otherwise, plus strategies on cultivating that necessary math mindset, and that’s what you can count on. Hello, hello. Welcome to a brand new episode. I’ve been toying with doing this series for a while, but it’s definitely one that I’ve had to work up the nerve to do. So let me start off by saying that the things that I am proposing in these episodes I am not perfect at doing, but they are what I am striving to do in my classroom on a regular basis. So let’s jump right in. Today. We’re going to be talking about notes. When I think of math class and I think of notes, there are two kinds of notes that come to mind. One is what I call like copy me notes, and the other is guided notes. Copy me notes are what I did for a long time in teaching. It’s where we’d all get out our notebooks. I put mine under the document camera and do a mix of direct instruction, writing notes down for students to copy and working through example problems. And it kind of had a little bit of I do, we do you do, but it was mostly direct instruction, and having students copy down what I had on my notebook into their notebook. And then the second style of notes we see often is guided notes. And these are a note taking structure that provides students with a framework to follow, like fill in the blanks and vocab sections to kind of help them stay focused by only giving them the blanks to fill in. And the purpose is to have them actively listen and participate during this guided notes time. Here’s what is not fantastic about either of these two options. Number one, multitasking is not a thing. I understand the purpose of specifically guided notes is to help them actively listen while participating and writing things down, but there have been several studies debunking the idea of multitasking, and it’s just our brain’s ability to rapidly move back and forth between one activity at a time, so students cannot listen, cannot write and cannot learn all at the same time, only one thing is happening as students are doing it, and it’s most likely not learning. And number two, kind of follows that in suit of students will fall behind no matter how long you give there is some student who does not have everything on their paper that you have on yours. And if you did, you would spend so much time getting every kid on the same page that other kids would fall unengaged, and we do not want that in our math classroom. We want students to be actively engaged. So students who fall behind are then copying down what we call dead notes. It’s not something that we’re currently talking about, so they’re just writing down what’s on the screen. There’s no thought or learning that’s happening with them, so when they look back at them, they’re not fully going to understand what that meant when they wrote it down. And then number three, again, kind of follows the same idea, but students don’t always look back at their notes and understand them because they weren’t in their own vernacular or their own verbiage to begin with. When we do the copy me notes or the printed out guided notes, these are things that we have created from our own brains. As teachers, when we have the full scope of math, like we know where this is going to go, we’ve learned eighth grade level math or whatever level you’re teaching, but these kids have not so they are trying to learn how we are thinking through our notes instead of how they think through the math with their own notes, if that makes sense. So how can we fix this? How can we make it more effective for students to better their learning and understanding overall? First thing is a lot of time notes come with direct instruction. And I am saying that we split those two things up. Direct Instruction is not happening while we do notes. Notes is not happening while direct instruction is happening. Students are not taking notes when we give direct instruction.

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In they are only listening and only watching. That is it with the direct instruction we are doing, maybe a few minutes of direct instruction, and then we have them turn and discuss with their team and recall what just happened, or, I say, summarize what we just did, and then either have them write it down after they discuss it, or move on and do this again. So do a little bit of a chunk of instruction, and then have them turn and discuss it with their team. Maybe write something down and just keep doing that. This is not formalized notes. These are just what students recall in their own verbiage. And the reason why recall is so important, after you do a chunk of instructions, you have students discuss it and try and remember what just happened is it strengthens their memory and improves their long term retention of whatever you’re talking about. And with that, as they’re recalling, they’re recalling with their group, the people that they’re sitting with. And so if they didn’t remember something, someone else can share that. And it’s kind of like a conglomeration of everything that that group remembers, and then they have a chance to jot that down. And so it gives them the opportunity to take what they did or what they saw and kind of formalize it in their own language. And that piece is huge. The next piece of how we can fix notes to be more effective for students and student learning is four quadrant notes. And this comes from Peter liljedahls latest research. I don’t think this piece is in his book, but it is talked about in many of his most recent webinars and whatnot, the four quadrant notes. And for me, I typically do these four quadrant notes after students are practicing. So it does not follow direct instruction, but it follows students doing the practice after the direct instruction. So the four quadrants are not the way the four quadrants are set up on a graph. It kind of goes left and clockwise. So it starts in the top left, moves to the top right, then goes down to the bottom right, to the bottom left. So he has reasonings behind it. It doesn’t make sense to me right now, and that’s okay, but the quadrants are effective, and I have seen that over the past two years. Of me do of me using them. So quadrant number one is a fill in the blank style problem, or what I call a problem skeleton. So whatever topic you’re using, you are creating a step by step fill in the blanks for that problem. So for example, if you are doing a Pythagorean Theorem problem, you would have a triangle, and it has the three signs you would label sign, a, three side, b4,

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and together you’re trying to find or students are trying to find C, and when you make out the skeleton, you’re saying blank squared plus blank squared equals blank squared. And then blank plus blank equals blank squared, and you’re just kind of continuing out that skeleton, and students will later fill in those blanks, and we’ll talk about how students do that in just a minute. Then quadrant two is going to be an example problem. And the way that it works is you’re going to give them the task or the question and have them turn it into a worked example. So the goal is not necessarily to get the answer, but it should create a worked example that they can refer back to later, their future, forgetful self, showcasing their learning. Then the bottom one quadrant three is they’re going to pick their own example. What example problem would they find helpful for themselves in the future to remember how they went about solving this style problem, and then quadrant four is just things to remember. What do I need to remember about the process or how to solve Pythagorean theorem, that when I look back at this three weeks, three weeks later, it will make sense to me, and I will remember how to solve Pythagorean theorem for the hypotenuse. So how do you actually implement this piece? Number one is, you are creating this with your students. You are projecting it on the screen or writing on a whiteboard. And they are going to do that with their teams at their whiteboards. So at the vertical whiteboards, they’re going to create the four quadrants. They’re going to copy down the problem skeleton, and then the example that you’re going to have them make into their own worked example. So when I do it, I make the four quadrants, I put out the fill in the blank problem, and I’ll put a picture on the show notes on my website, so you can kind of more visually understand what I’m saying. And then I’ll put the problem I want them to do in the second quadrant, and then I’ll have them complete three and four with their team, since those are coming from their own brains, rather than the things that I’m giving them. And then with their group of three at the whiteboard, they are solving this. They are putting it together. And then phase two of this is having.

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Them do it in their notebook, so copying it down from what their team did on the board to their notebook. And what’s cool about this is they don’t have to copy exactly what they did on the board. They can steal from other teams and say, like, I really like the example problem that group five did. I’m going to copy that one down instead. So it doesn’t have to be verbatim what they did on their board, goes into their books. It just has to be the same thing. So the four quadrants and the four pieces of those quadrants, now that is the ideal way to do the four quadrant problem, or the four quadrant notes. And honestly, I’ve done this way several, several times, and I love it. I think it’s great having that collaboration piece with students, because it gets done more often when you do on boards, just because whiteboards have that higher engagement than writing on paper. But sometimes I do skip the whiteboard and just go straight to the notebook. Maybe we’re running out of time in class, and I want to make sure they have something written down that is something that I need to work on with my students, because I have seen the benefits of having them do it on the whiteboard and then putting in their notes. So my goal is to have them do it more on whiteboards and then in their notes, but it’s something that I’m continually working on. So to give you that I’m not 100% fantastic at all the things that I shared, but again, it is my goal and what I strive for to do these things, because I know and have seen how effective they are for students, going from maybe 20% of kids doing the copy me notes or the guidance notes to having almost 100% of students doing the four quadrant notes with their teams and then copying it down in their notebooks. All right, in summary of what we talked about today, we talked about how the copy me notes and guided notes are not as effective as we want them to be, and it has students falling behind, especially since multitasking is not really a thing. We can’t listen write and learn all at the same time. So in talking about how we fixed it, we talked about separating direct instruction from notes and giving that divide. So when students are hearing the direct instruction, all they are doing is listening and watching. They’ll recall with their team, write anything down that they want to remember, then we’ll repeat that. And then after we do practice with our students on their whiteboards, then they can do the four quadrant notes and the four quadrant notes they do at the whiteboards with their team to kind of consolidate their learning. And then the second phase of that is having them copy it down into their notebooks. So I know it’s a lot of information, especially if this is a new idea for you. I can feel some people out there cringing because their whole world is guided notes. I totally get it. I’ve been there. It is a transition, but I will tell you, it’s a freeing transition. This is year two of me doing the four quadrant notes, and the year before, these two years, I did what Peter Liljedahl suggested beforehand, which is like the things to remember more, like active style notes. So I will tell you, it’s freeing once you let yourself try this out and see how beneficial it can be for your students. So if you have questions, as always, feel free to reach out to me on Instagram @misskuiper. I’m happy to have a conversation with you about anything we talked about in today’s episode.

And with that, I’ll calc-u-later.

Thank you so much for tuning into today’s episode. To find all the links and resources to things talked about in this episode, head on over to misskuipersclassroom.com and click on podcast.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai