Monday, October 6, 2014

Guided note-taking

When you're given a short text to analyze and respond to, you can benefit from taking notes as you read it for the first time. This will help you organize your thoughts, identify the parts of the text that give you trouble, and focus on finding answers to the questions or prompt provided. 

****PLEASE NOTE: When I assign you questions that come attached to a text, I expect your answers to be supported by the text. You will not receive full credit for answers that are not based in textual evidence/logic. 

Below is one way of structuring your notes for better organization and clarity:

1. First ask yourself: What do I need to know?
  • Accompanying questions to the text will often provide specific information about what you need to know/what you need to find out.
  • If there are no specific questions, but rather a prompt or directions for a guided response, then you should try to answer: how will I prove my opinion?
  • Bottom line: read questions/guidelines/directions before you begin to read the text.
2. What do I know/how do I know what I know?
  • As you read, underline or make note of any passage that may provide an answer to the questions in the previous step. 
  • Summarize these ideas in your own language
  • You must support any conclusions with evidence/logic from the text. 
3. What questions do I have?
  • Is there anything unclear in the text? Are you missing certain key information necessary to draw conclusions? Is there something you disagree with? Write it down for further investigation.
  • Developing questions about the text helps us think critically about what is being written, and helps us identify gaps in our own knowledge. 
4. How will I find my answers?
  • Questions are an important part of beginning to understand a text, but the pursuit of answers will actually help us deepen our learning and give us a clearer idea of what we're dealing with. 
  • Finding answers may involve re-reading the text to check for details you might have missed.
  • Finding answers may also involve taking matters into your own hands: asking a knowledgeable source, doing research, thinking deeper about the question, etc. 

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