Wednesday and Thursday 9/16 and 9/17

Fell behind on my blogging, sorry!

The last class for each student consisted of beginning the process of learning how to do Cornell Notes.

Cornell Notes is a note taking system developed by a professor at Cornell University. He created the process in response to the disorganized notes he saw his students keeping. He realized his students were spending too much time organizing their notes in preparation for study.

If students, will follow the process I am teaching them, their notes should be well organized and ready for study when it is time to prepare for a test. My goal is for this process to be second nature to them by the time they go to college.

Last week we just began the process, so rather than explaining the process over 2 blogs, I will explain the entire note taking process in my blog after today's class.

You can check what the students have done so far. Their notes should be about the Achievement Gap and should cover the introduction of Closing the African American Achievement Gap in Washington report which was given to the State Legislature in December 2008, and the presentation of Thelma Jackson's African American Achievement Gap in Tacoma report which was given to the Tacoma School Board in September of 2009. We looked at some of her recommendations for closing the gap which include: making it a priority, having a strategic plan, and mandatory teacher training in the areas of multicultural education, cultural competency, culturally and linguistically-responsive teaching, culturally-inclusive curriculum, learning styles, understanding institutional racism, and cross-cultural communication with staff, students, parents/families, and the community. You can also ask them what these topics mean. We discussed them, but I don't think they took very good notes on that part.