In this article, Mr. Battaglia pulls insights from the Trivium to offer practical guidance to History teachers on note taking for students.
There is a distinct memory in my mind of a time in high school when my Biology teacher devoted an entire class period to teaching his class on how to take notes. While I remember doubting the effectiveness of his method at the time, I listened intently and earnestly sought to apply his techniques and advice. And, despite my initial suspicion, the methods were transformative and propelled me forward to significantly greater long-term success as a learner.
Now that I’m sitting on the other side of the table, I see more clearly than ever that intentional and guided instruction in the skill of note taking can make a sizable difference for a student’s acquisition and retention of knowledge. Is there a panacea for note taking that serves as a full-stop method for any and all students? No, so far as I know, that method does not exist. I’ve not found any one practice that serves as a “catch-all” for every student. However, there are principles to note taking that classical educators should borrow from the tradition that will help advance students’ acquisition and retention of knowledge. These principles are found in the Trivium itself.
Grammar
When guiding students in the skill of note taking, classical teachers should consider the grammar or the basics of what is being taught for each lesson. In a history lesson, these details tend to take the form of dates, persons, ideas, topics, and/or events. A teacher of history ought to consider what are the fundamental bits of information (vocabulary, facts, etc.) that will build student learning and attention throughout the lesson.
Teachers lead their students into a common pitfall when they direct their students to copy down extensive amounts of information in their notes from a slide or board. If the student is trying to copy down everything written, this prevents them from attending to the important details and missing the overall narrative arc of the lesson. In trying to record as many trees as possible, the student fails to see the forest. Haven’t you taken notes for something only to find them incomprehensible when returning to them later? This occurs as students are narrowly and hyper-focused on one task, getting everything written down from the board, and not assimilating the material.
In place of extensive amounts of information, give students the fundamentals of what they need. Don’t let them get fixated on whether they heard the wrong date or misspelled a name. For example, if the story of the American colonists’ unrest is being told, I might draw attention to following notes while telling the story:
- Prime Minister George Grenville
- Sugar Act (proposed 1764)
- Currency Act of 1764
- Parliament produces the Stamp Act in 1765
By giving students, for example, that the Stamp Act was in 1765, their attention is freed up to describing the finer details of the Stamp Act in their notes.
Dialectic
For each lesson taught in your history class, consider centering the discussion and lecture around a question. This is where the dialectic or logic aspect of the Trivium in your note taking occurs: position a question or questions to the class that will serve as the main guide to their note taking.
For example, to use an example from earlier, let’s consider that the goal of the lesson is to know the story of the colonists’ unrest following the Royal Proclamation of 1763. Before giving the students any notes of grammar, they will have “Question(s) to Consider” for answering that offers a way of organizing the day’s notes. For this particular lesson, the questions for them to transcribe in their notes would be:
- What did the Stamp Act do?
- Why did it undermine the principle of self-government?
- How did the colonists respond?
These guide their notes not only in their ability to respond throughout the lesson, but also supplies them with clear guardrails for what is important. Your aim is to coach students to engage in a dialectical exercise with the material being presented and discussed. Therefore, the dialectic should be constant and should sometimes manifest in a question or comment offered out loud in class. It complements the Grammar aspect of note taking as students identify the evidence for answering the question.
Rhetoric
In the note taking process, the last step of guidance from the teacher is providing an opportunity for the students to show what they know by asking them to “tell back” the information taught. In my classroom, I call this guidance “Narrate in Notes.” Here, I grant students the opportunity to in 4-6 sentences to tell back in written form what they recall from the lesson. So, in keeping with the aforementioned example, I instruct students to write a four to six sentence response that begins with George Grenville and ends with the colonists’ response to the Stamp Act. I remind them to include the fundamental details I gave them in their response.
In this last step, I have not only supported them by giving them the grammar and dialectic to give a strong response, but also required them to practice retention by means of recall in the form of a coherent summary. The hope being that when they return to their notes later, they will have an original response that will be more readily remembered.
All in all, I teach my students that this approach to note taking is called QUEN (Question, Evidence, and Narration). The question aspect deals with the dialectic where students are given one or more questions to guide their thinking for the lesson. The evidence is the grammar of the lesson that gives them the important details for which to build off of for answering the questions. And, finally, the narration is the rhetorical piece of the note taking that requires students to put it all together. An opportunity for them to tell back what they remember of the story that helps further cement their retention and understanding of the material.
