Notebook Guidelines for High School Math (interactive notebook)
Throughout this whole school year, as I’ve been grading student work and checking video notes, I’ve been keeping a running list of things I want students to work on for next year. These things vary from how they write their work when solving equations, to notation issues I want them to work on from the start, to how they organize their notebooks.
Now that I have my list of things, it will be easier to start off next year fresh with these expectations rather than try to get everyone to change their ways three quarters into the school year. I spent this weekend working on formatting these guidelines into a nice visual infographic for students to tape into their notebooks on the first day of school. I started with a non-color version:
and then played around with adding color to make it more visually appealing and to make the sections stand out more:
I think this is the version I will stick with for next year. I am going to ask every student to get a full-size 5-subject notebook to use just for math. I have found that the students who begin the year with a 3 or 5-subject notebook and maintain this same notebook throughout the entire year without mixing in other subjects do the best. They are able to easily refer back to past topics to refresh their memory, preventing them from getting stuck. The students who begin the year with a flimsy 1-subject notebook inevitably run out of room a few months in and need to replace it. Once they begin a new 1-subject notebook, they don’t have their prior work to use as a reference and often end up losing their earlier notebook(s) and then have nothing to use when preparing for tests and the final exam. Some students naturally are organized and enjoy creating a detailed, complete notebook to showcase their learning. Others need some help with this, and my goal is to help them establish good organization routines. Once they see how satisfying it is to watch their notebook grow to display all their learning, my hope is that they will continue these habits in the future, not only with school notebooks, but with personal planners and general life planning (paper or digital).
In addition to taping these notebook guidelines onto page 1 of their notebook, they will also tape down a ‘Video List’ of all the videos for the year and a blank ‘Table of Contents’ sheet. I might have them save 3 extra pages for a new table of contents for each quarter. That way all four tables of contents are at the beginning. I am going to try having them number the pages in their notebooks and fill out the table of contents for all main lessons and video notes we do. Ideally they will fill out the table of contents as we go and put the page number with it. I have also found that students struggle to find past lessons and notes in their notebooks, so a table of contents could help them quickly find everything while also serving as a visual outline of all topics done and in what order they were done. No more, “Did we do polynomial long division before or after rational root theorem?” while endlessly flipping through pages.
The notebook guidelines I created are somewhat similar to the better-known ‘interactive notebooks’ that one of my co-workers presented a PD on. I liked her ideas and realized that what I currently do is already somewhat close to an interactive notebook. I will not, however, have student split a page in half to do ‘react to new information’ side. I have never collected student notebooks for notebook checks, but I think I will try doing that once a quarter next year for a grade, instead of collecting and grading a packet of warm-ups for a grade. Currently, 10% of students’ quarter grade is from their packet of warm-up sheets from the quarter. I want to replace this with a notebook grade instead.
These are the warm-up sheets I have been using and grading for the past 12 years:
Students use this to complete the warm-ups projected on the whiteboard at the beginning of most, but not all, classes. Their job is to save all the sheets until the end of the quarter, when I collect their stapled packets and grade them. I spend too much time going through them and checking that they completed each day’s problem fully, dated their questions, didn’t skip boxes unnecessarily, and put them in order. Some students end up losing their sheets, and then I think they just copy a friend’s problems, which isn’t ideal, but how else would they get the questions? I might keep a running Google Doc posted on Google Classroom of all the warm-ups questions (I do not currently do this).
Instead of spending hours checking warm-up sheets, I plan on having them organize their notebooks as follows:
Subjects 1, 2, 3: Video notes, classwork, 1/2 sheets of problems, taped discovery activities, etc
Subject 4: All bookwork or online PDF homework
Subject 5: Warm-up problems
I think I will have them fit 2-3 warm-up questions per page, and put the dates of those problems at the top of the page. Then when I collect notebooks, I will flip through the warm-up section while also checking their table of contents and numbered pages of work.
This will be a work in progress and I’m sure I will adjust it as I figure out what works and is helpful to students and what is unnecessary. Stay tuned!