Manuel Jantos & Jeff Fan
20 Feb 2022
You know how you are always telling your students to take notes?
Here are some strategies and tips so you can support your message with practical information in your lesson.
Tag: effective listening, listening skills, academic skills, essential, foundation, help tips for Academic English
Tips for teaching note-taking:
You know how you are always telling your students to take notes?
Here are some strategies and tips so you can support your message with practical information in your lesson.
How does it help the students to understand the listening material better?
How can we incorporate the Cornell note-taking method into our lesson plans? But most importantly, how do we teach the Cornell note-taking method effectively?
Tips to teach the Cornell note-taking method
What material or activities you can add to this?
Context and reasons to adopt
Students at university are expected to learn and then demonstrate their knowledge and understanding of information
Students have to remember a lot of information
They also have to be able to recall that information
1. Short term: when they’re studying information after they learn it or,
2. Long term: a long time after they learn it such as right before exams later in a semester
Usefulness
a. Using the Cornell Method of notetaking organizes ideas in a logical manner
b. It can be used when reading information or listening to information
c. It encourages the notetaker to be critical and engage with the information more than just listing information because students are organizing ideas into groups and (in the key words or headings and notes), paraphrasing (in the notes), and then critically thinking and evaluating information (in the summary).
d. The more critical and involved a learning activity is
e. In brief, students practice using skills such as:
1. Listening / reading
2. Organizing ideas (headings / notes)
3. Paraphrasing (notes)
4. Critical thinking (headings / notes)
5. Evaluation (summary)
f. Possible downside: The Cornell Method may not be the most appropriate method to show relationships between ideas. For this, a mind map may be better.
How to do it
a. Divide the paper into sections
b. Mark or make space for 4 areas that include:
i. the title (top),
ii. headings (left side),
iii. notes (right side), and
iv. summary (bottom).
c. Listen to or read something effectively.
Using the Cornell Method notes
a. After a student takes notes using the Cornell Method, they can easily refer back to the information
b. They can clearly find information under headings they wrote
c. They can see paraphrases of ideas
d. They can read the summary they wrote for a concise review of the notes to save time