Cooperative Teaching Notetaking Model – Shared Digital Notes
By Bryan Meadows
I co-teach in a high school biology class where EL students constitute around half of the 30 total students enrolled. During class time, I like to make teacher rounds in the classroom, checking in with ELL students individually at their seats. This is especially important during teacher-centered classroom activities such as mini-lectures and extended teacher explanations. However, with space limitations being what they are, I can become a disruption to surrounding students at each student stop. One might imagine attempting to make individual consultations in a crowded movie theater. So, I was looking for an alternative way to connect with individual EL students in real-time during classroom instruction – without becoming a disruption myself. One exciting classroom solution is shared digital notes. Essentially, the idea is for me to type listening notes during teacher-centered classroom activities and to make those notes available to students digitally in real-time in the classroom. What is innovative about this arrangement is that I am able to reach all students in their seats in real-time while I am in a single central location.
This is how it works. I open a single Google document at the beginning of a content unit (e.g., cell parts, macromolecules, etc.). I invite all ELL students in the class into the document with commentator privileges. In this classroom, all students have Chromebooks and use Google Classroom on a regular basis. Using their Chromebooks at their seats, students can follow the link they receive and enter the document. Once inside the document, they are able to see my notes as I type them. So, while I am typing notes in class, all students can see those notes as they are being created and in their respective seats in the classroom setting. With this technique, I can effectively bridge the need to connect with students during teacher lectures with the challenges of limited physical classroom space.
When taking notes, I am creating multiple language supports simultaneously. For example, I am highlighting for students key details from the teacher’s lecture by using the highlighter function in Google Docs. I am segmenting (i.e., chunking) content into sections by skipping lines and bolding sub-headings in the notes. I am also using the translate function to translate key terms and concepts into the multiple languages spoken in this classroom: Spanish, Portuguese, Ukrainian, and Arabic. I am also grabbing images to integrate into the notes where visuals can extend student comprehension. Importantly, I am also listening to and interpreting the teacher-centered lecture. This includes summarizing and paraphrasing, but also quoting the teacher’s language verbatim. The verbatim portions are valuable because they both reinforce EL student exposure to language expressions typical of the content areas (i.e., Zwiers’s notion of “mortar”) and provide essential elements for future sentence and paragraph frames that I create with the co-teacher. I continue with the same shared document during the individual unit of study. As such, the document remains on everyone’s google drive allowing all EL students to reference the notes as needed throughout the unit. For example, I observed multiple students using the shared notes recently as a reference tool to complete a unit-final project.
As I continue to refine the technique in my work with students in this setting, I look ahead to the possibility of increased student engagement in real-time with the shared document. For example, I envision students eventually being able to insert margin comments in real-time in class. Additionally, as the EL students become more acclimated to the shared document, there are strong opportunities for them to become co-authors – wherein the students and I take turns leading notes during teacher-centered activities allowing those in the secondary role to provide annotations and additional supports.
Reference
Zwiers, Jeff. (2014) Building Academic Language: Meeting Common Core Standards Across Disciplines, Grades 5–12, Second Edition. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
The Author – Bryan Meadows is a secondary ESL teacher with South River Public Schools. He holds a PhD in Second Language Acquisition and Teaching and an MEd in Second Language Education. Over 25 years of service in the field of language education, Bryan has held a variety of roles that include classroom instructor, university faculty, academic researcher, teacher educator, instructional coach, and program director. His research appears in over 30 peer-reviewed publications. He holds NJDOE certifications for ESL (K-12), Elementary (K-6), and Supervisor.
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