Model the Notes

The steps

1. Plan the page before the lesson. Decide what good notes on this content should look like: the headings, the layout, roughly how many lines. Sketching it takes about two minutes. The sketch also shows you where your explanation breaks into chunks, which sharpens the teaching itself.
2. Tell the class what you are doing, and why. The first time you use it, name the skill directly.
   You've been told to make notes for years. Today I'm going to show you how. Watch what I write, and listen to why I write it.
3. Say the idea in full, then write the short version. Talk through one chunk of the explanation with pens down. Then pause and build that chunk's notes on the board while students write with you. Keeping the talking and the writing separate lets students attend to each in turn.
4. Narrate every choice. Explain why a word stays, why a sentence shrinks, and why a point goes unrecorded. Show the tools as you use them: abbreviations, arrows, indenting.
   I said all of that in about a hundred words. On the page it's five, because the date and the place carry the story. Everything else I can rebuild from those.
   Every few chunks, hand the choice to the class:
   I've just made three points. Which one earns a line?
5. Go and read their pages. While students finish a chunk, circulate and look at their books. You are looking for two things: full transcripts of the board, and structure that has gone missing. Fix whatever you find at the board, out loud, for everyone.
6. Hand the notes over a chunk at a time. In the next explanation, students write the final chunk's notes alone, then compare them with your version.
   Last chunk is yours. Write the line you think I'd write, then we'll compare.
   Increase their share over the following weeks until they are making full pages of notes alone.

How you’ll know it’s working

• Writing happens in the pauses you leave. While you talk, pens stay down, and nobody is trying to transcribe and listen at the same time.
• Pages carry the board's structure without being exact copies of it: the same headings and layout, with wording that varies from book to book.
• The notes are short. Sample five books after an explanation: a chunk you spoke in a hundred words should appear on the page as a line or two.
• When you hand a chunk over, count the blank pages. Expect fewer each week, and expect the lines students write themselves to look more like the ones you modelled.

Weigh it up

Why it’s worth it

• "Make notes" becomes an instruction students can follow. They have seen what a good page looks like and heard the decisions behind it, so the vague command finally refers to a taught skill.
• Choosing what to write down pushes students to process the explanation. Deciding which of three points earns a line means weighing the ideas while listening, and note-taking research finds that ideas which reach the page are more likely to be remembered than ideas which do not.
• The pages pay off months later. A book with structure and readable shorthand is still usable when revision begins, in your subject and in others.
• Less lesson time disappears into copying. Minutes of silent transcription become listening, choosing and short bursts of writing, and attention from the front tends to improve as a result.
• Planning the page sharpens the explanation itself. Sketching the notes first shows you your chunks, your order and what genuinely matters, before you are standing at the board.

The costs

• It slows the explanation down. Saying a chunk, then writing it, then narrating the choices adds minutes to every lesson that uses the technique.
• Planning the page is real preparation, and it recurs with every new topic until you have taught the course this way once.
• One subject alone builds the skill slowly. Students who only meet it in your room will need topping up all year; the approach pays best when colleagues teach it too.