Note-Taking is Thinking

How students process information is at least as important as how teachers deliver it.

The most important things to teach children are critical thinking and problem solving skills, so that children can learn how to think.

No—the most important thing to teach children is academic content across the subject areas, so that children can have something concrete to think about.

No—the most important thing to teach children is how to take tests strategically and effectively, because, in the end, that’s how they’re going to be judged by the educational gatekeepers who hold children’s futures in their hands.

You would think, after teaching generations of children, we’d know which things were most important to focus on. But you’d be wrong. In fact, if I’ve learned anything in my years working in education (a debatable proposition), it’s that any sentence starting with “you would think,” is a sentence that’s going to end in tears.

Allow me to complicate the issue even further. I’m all for teaching skills and teaching content and even approaching tests strategically, but I’d like to offer another candidate for your consideration: the ordinary and often-overlooked skills of note-taking and studying.

Seriously?

Yes, seriously. The more I think about it, the more amazed I am that we obsess over what to teach, while spending so little time on what students should do with what we teach. I mean, obviously, we focus on “doing” when it comes to activities, assignments, and tests. We focus on final, summative products. But are we focusing enough on what students do in the earliest moments of learning? When we teach, what should our learners be doing? When they read, in groups or alone, what should they be doing? When they go home and reflect on their day, what should they be doing? And when they are preparing to engage in upcoming activities, assignments, or tests, to demonstrate their learning, what should they be doing to ensure that those demonstrations will be successful? How should students receive and process the information and ideas we provide them with?

I have very clear memories of being taught, in 6^th grade, how to take notes in outline form. We were learning about ancient Greek mythology, and our teacher showed us how to organize information by listing things in sequences of increasingly indented numbers and letters or bullet points. It worked perfectly for something as linear as the pantheon of Greek gods. It helped us capture the important information in an easy-to-read format, and more: it helped us see how some details related to and supported the main ideas, and how other details supported or illustrated those first details. I still take notes in outline form, almost all the time.

I’m not saying that this method is the only method or the best method; I’m just saying that it is a method. How we catch something is just as important as how someone pitches it. Where I put information in a notebook or on a tablet is just as important as where I put my house-keys when I come home. In both cases, if I just throw stuff down randomly, it’s going to create anxiety down the road, when I need it and have no idea where to find it.

Learning how to take down information schematically also helped me see how information worked; it taught me that information had a structure and organization and purpose to it, and it taught me how to listen for that structure and organization. The way I wrote down notes actually helped me think about what the information meant.

And yet, very few of the teachers I’ve known have taught these skills explicitly as part of their curriculum. They have a variety of reasons for not touching this topic, including:

• They assume these things were taught in an earlier grade

• They assume these things are just “picked up” in life, somehow

• They feel like they don’t have time in their pacing plan

• They don’t know an effective method for note-taking, themselves

• It simply doesn’t occur to them that explicit teaching of note-taking is needed

These are all valid and understandable excuses, but think about the unfortunate results. We spend all our time preparing engaging and rigorous lessons, honing our instructional practice to a fine point—but the people on the receiving end may not have the right tools to catch what we’re pitching. I’ve seen students writing down nothing at all. I’ve seen students desperately trying to write down every word I’ve been saying. They simply don’t know what matters, so they have no idea what to do with the flood of stuff getting thrown at them.

Some teachers I know type up and share their notes to help students prepare for an exam, or they make their PowerPoint presentations available within an online learning management system. But if we, or new technology tools using generative AI, do all the summarization and analysis for them, we’re not helping them process and internalize information for themselves. Students are not mere spectators in a class; they’re meant to be active participants in it. Learning is work.

What Could Be

If note-taking is as integral to learning as I suspect it is, it needs to be taken more seriously—not simply just at a classroom level, but across the entire school. Especially as students get older and deal with multiple teachers, it’s crazy-making to have to do things in completely different, often arbitrary ways. Why does your first-period teacher require your name to go in the upper left, followed by the date, when your second-period teacher requires your name to go in the upper right, after the date? Why does your science teacher post assignments on Canvas, but your English teacher posts somewhere else that she likes better?  So much of what we do in school meets the individual needs and desires of the adults, while making the world incoherent for students and their parents. Some of the individualization may be important to the way the content is taught, but a lot of it is probably personal preference.

Think how powerful it would be if schools did more than simply hand out a planner at the beginning of the year. Imagine if at an opening assembly, the principal taught all students how the school expected them to use the planner (after some collaborative decision-making among staff). Here’s where you should write down your homework for each subject; here’s how we’d like to see you write it down, so that it’s the same across classes—easy for you to check (and easy for your parents to check).  And then: here’s our school-wide, recommended method of note-taking.  There are some basics we like to see across all subjects and grades. Your subject teachers may have tweaks and additions related to their subjects, and that’s fine: science teachers may need something extra, social studies teachers may, as well. But the core of note-taking is something we’d like to be consistent across grades and subjects.

Imagine how much easier it would be for teachers to check notes in class—and for mentors and coaches to see how students are doing during observations. Imagine how much easier it would be for parents to help their children at home. Imagine how much easier it would be for students to use their notes.

Students don’t have a union representing their interests, but they definitely have a vote in how school is run. If they find a class boring or confusing, they can zone out, check out, or act up in protest. We often treat those things as character flaws rather than pointed and deliberate commentaries on what we’re doing.

We need to pay attention to what the school day looks like and feels like to the student. We need to do whatever we can to decrease fragmentation and incoherence, to make school feel like a thoughtfully constructed, intentional community designed around learning, where the parts reflect and comment on each other and on the whole. If we want students to be active participants in and shapers of their learning, not docile spectators, we need to care about—and think carefully about—how we want them to engage with that learning, minute by minute and day by day.