Chris Woods is a high school math, science, and STEM teacher, and the author of Daily STEM: How to Create a STEM Culture in Your Classrooms & Communities.
You can visit his website at DailySTEM.com and find him on Twitter/X @DailySTEM
Key Takeaways:
Teaching students how to take notes is crucial—students often lack note-taking skills due to digital learning..
Handwritten notes improve retention and understanding.
Colored pencils can enhance engagement in note-taking.
Normalizing creative note-taking fosters a positive classroom environment.
Checking and grading notebooks reinforces the importance of note-taking.
Using color helps students visualize processes in math.
Encouraging artistic expression in notes can boost confidence.
Full Transcript:
Justin Baeder (00:09):
Welcome everyone to the Teaching Show. I’m your host Justin Baeder, and I’m honored to welcome to the program today Chris Woods. Chris, welcome. Tell us a little bit about yourself and then we’ll get into it.
Chris Woods (00:18):
Hey, Justin, great to be on with you and real privilege and honor, and yeah, I’m a teacher. I teach math. I teach high school math and science and STEM class, and I just really do a lot of things to as much as I can, help other educators incorporate some STEM into their classrooms easy ways. It doesn’t have to be five day projects, it could be five minute things you do every day in a class.
Justin Baeder (00:40):
I love seeing what you post on Twitter at daily stem or X as it’s called these days. And one of the things I saw recently was you have an approach to student notetaking where you give out colored pencils and you said that makes a big difference. So let’s talk about it. Tell us about the colored pencil notetaking.
Chris Woods (00:56):
Yeah. Well, first of all, even to back up beyond that, I’m an old school math kind of teacher, and notes are so important. When a kid is actively writing their ideas, it helps ‘em to focus. It helps ‘em to concentrate, also helps ‘em to summarize. And even if they’re not required to do it, I want my kids to learn that in their other classes. Let’s make sure that we take notes of the technique for helping them to study. I think we also see, with the proliferation of Chromebooks in classrooms, it’s easy to let kids just start taking notes on a Chromebook there you’re just typing a key and you make one keystroke and that’s a G. You’d take one keystroke and that’s an X, and your mind can’t tell the difference. It’s just one keystroke either way. So as much as we can to get kids back to writing is huge.
(01:46):
This year I’ve done more of just grabbing colored pencils and handing ‘em out, putting a couple on each desk. And especially in the math class, I’m sure you remember Justin, when you’re trying to follow all those steps and you look back through your notes, you just see a bunch of writing, you don’t see that kind of process that it took to get from the start to the end. So that color kind of shows those kids when they look back at it. Plus it also helps ‘em. They’re engaged a lot more just picking up, dropping this pencil, picking up this one without making an extra big deal or a lot of extra time in class too.
Justin Baeder (02:19):
I love it. So we’re three layers deep here. The first layer that I think is really worth emphasizing, and I’m glad you started there, is kids should take notes now. Do you have to teach note taking? Do your students come in knowing how to take notes?
Chris Woods (02:30):
So the years that I’ve taught ninth grade math, like algebra one, I really have to kind of dive into that. Here’s how to take notes, especially those first few weeks, couple weeks, I’m checking that notebook and I’ve always given the kids a grade for their notebook. I always counted in whatever participation category or whatever an educator has at their district and their school. But I’ll check their notes. I’ll say, Hey, these are looking good, 10 out of 10, or you can improve on this five out of 10, or things like that. Yeah, kids often don’t know how to take notes, especially because more and more the textbook is digital. The learning is virtual and different things like that. So I’ve had to more and more, even in my algebra two and pre-calc classes, still make sure that I’m encouraging and checking those kids’ notes, still giving ‘em a grade because I think it’s a great way to reinforce that this is important because when they go to college or off into the career and whatever, I mean, you and I, Justin, even for a podcast, we’re making notes ahead of time to think about what do we want to talk about?
(03:34):
Everybody takes notes. Helping those kids to learn that valuable skill at a young age is so important. Absolutely.
Justin Baeder (03:43):
So that’s the first layer, and you added a ton there about just the teaching and the building on that note-taking skill over time. And then the second layer is that these are handwritten notes. And I don’t think I started taking typed notes until very late in my college education, but that’s probably a good thing because I’ve seen a lot of research lately that says typed notes are just not as good on a lot of fronts. So you don’t have your students use laptops at all to take notes?
Chris Woods (04:05):
No. And again, the reason, I mean, number one, a math classroom, it’s really tough to make notes virtually, but again, with using touchscreen or using a pen or on digital screen, it is possible. And you know what? Maybe in that situation, some digital notes would be fine if you’re using an iPad with an eye pencil or something like that, but not every kid is going to have that. And so often it’s much simpler to just paper, pencil, tactile. I mean, it was over a decade ago that I read an article and it was the difference between handwritten and keystrokes and just that simple research and it completely makes sense. A P and a W and an R, it’s exactly the same button so your mind doesn’t connect them any differently. But those three different motions to make the W or the two different motions to make that letter P, it ingrains differently into all those neurons and pathways in your mind.
Justin Baeder (05:05):
And I think that research has held up very well. I’ve continued to see articles and studies on just the power of handwritten notes and their advantages over type notes. And then the third layer is the colored pencils. So tell us a little bit more about how students use those colored pencils and how they help make the notes better and more useful to students.
Chris Woods (05:22):
And this can apply across a wide variety of subjects. I’m coming at it from a math and even in a science classroom, I do the same when I teach chemistry or eighth grade science or whatever, if a kid just has a page full of pencil or pen or whatever color they’re using, and you look back at that page, it’s just a page full of just writing. You don’t see, if you were to make, think of the difference between a picture and a GIF online, or you could say Jif if you want Justin, I don’t care. But if you see that motion, that picture is worth a thousand words. That is worth a thousand times a thousand. If you just have a page full of all the same color, you can’t see what happened. And so just putting a couple of different colored pencils on every desk to start a class, I’ve seen other teachers where they’ll have just a red pen, and that’s kind of partly for correction purposes and partly for adding that extra color to your notes, but just mixing up those colors so the kids can, okay, now we’re subtracting eight from both sides.
(06:24):
Now we’re dividing both sides by three. Now we’re square rooting both sides. And once you give kids that little bit of color, they’re bringing in their own pocket full of extra colored pens and highlighters, and it almost like it makes it okay for that kid to show off all their artisticness while they’re just taking some notes. And then when they look back at it, it helps them to see and summarize. They’re highlighting the main points, and I’m not even telling ‘em to, they’re just naturally doing that on their own. I think it’s a valuable thing that educators, across the spectrum of courses, subjects, I think it’s a simple thing to do instead of just having those colored pencils sitting in a cabinet for four months of the year and you pull ‘em out this week when you do a project, and this week when you do a poster board, have ‘em out all every time, every day.
Justin Baeder (07:20):
Love it, love it. And kids bring their own, you said they’re using their own pens and highlighters once you’ve given them permission. We probably all went to school with someone who used highlighters and color pencils and pens, and it seemed like they were kind of showing off in their note taking. And I think there’s that. This isn’t a normal thing to do feeling, so I love that you’re making that normal and expected for everybody.
Chris Woods (07:39):
And it’s the same thing as making that thing normal of a kid having a book on their desk because when they finished, they like to read, pointing that out and reassuring that kid, it’s okay to be a bookworm. That math kid, Hey, it’s okay to be a nerd. Those aren’t putdowns. Those aren’t negative things. We should want to be bookworms and nerds and geeks and hard workers and all the other names that kids come up with that they think it’s a putdown, but man, those are the people that are getting way ahead in life. I love it.
Justin Baeder (08:09):
Well, Chris, thank you so much for sharing your strategy and what goes into it and what makes it work. If people want to follow you, find you online, where are some of the best places for them to go?
Chris Woods (08:17):
Yeah, I am always sharing stuff on Twitter or X @DailySTEM. You can also check on my website dailystem.com. I got tons of great free resources to help and just reach out if you want to email me dailystem@gmail.com. Always happy to help
Justin Baeder (08:30):
Chris Woods, thank you so much for joining me on the Teaching Show.
