Teaching Conceptual Note Taking Skills
We all want our students to learn deeply, but what does that look like? Understanding must be earned by the learner through active mental manipulation of higher order thinking skills. In our information saturated world, teachers are no longer dispensers of information, but rather need to become facilitators of helping students to understand information by directing active meaning making.
Some thinking skills to guide our lessons should include: conceptualizing, note taking/summarizing, compare/contrast, reading comprehension, predicting, visualizing, and perspective/empathizing. These thinking skills encapsulate the essentials of good thinking, they separate high achievers from the rest, they are under taught and undervalued, and finally they give teachers a simple way to increase student achievement and success. These vital thinking skills need to be a part of our everyday lesson instruction because they help students deepen their understanding of content and they are transferable skills that students can use throughout school into their work life.
Conceptualizing includes practicing the skills of using information to understand important relationships and concepts. It encourages students to think bigger. Students learn deeper when they are taught how to conceptualize. Students need to be able to transfer this type of thinking when they enter higher education classes with less of a teacher directed focus. The good news is that conceptual thinking is how our brains are wired. We all look for patterns, even when there are none. The bad news is that we primarily do this subconsciously. The thinking problem occurs when we ask students to think conceptually on demand as it is not commonly or explicitly taught.
Here are some ways that we like to have our students conceptualize when we are reviewing what we learned:
We like to use the sentence frame of I see (topic/lesson/text) as a study in (universal concept) because ______.
For all of our note taking graphic organizers, be sure to check “Not Your Standard Set of Graphic Organizers Bundle”
Happy teaching!