Taking notes

Taking notes it is really important. Or at least, that is what every single teacher repeat again and again. But, Have we ever taught the students how to take notes? Is it something that you don't need to learn?
This year I have found an amazing way of teaching kids how to take notes (useful for adults also!!!).
Those are known as Cornell Notes.

Here it is the idea. The students must know all the time what they should learn. So, in the head of the paper they are gonna write the essential question and the objective. The essential question is a question that the students should be able to answer using these notes.
Then the students take the notes of what they think it is relevant, important for them. It is important they do that on their own. The teacher is not supposed to tell them what to copy or not to copy.
After taking notes, they should read them again and divide every idea. After that they should come up with a question related with that specific idea. When they are done, they should make a summary of these notes.
Let's see some amazing example of one of my students:

Jo Boaler

After taking an online course of Jo Boaler, I changed my way of looking at maths… I should say the way of teaching math. She has great ideas, some of them you can find here:
http://www.youcubed.org

how we kill creativity in our educational environment...

This is one of these videos that you cannot stop thinking about… What do you think?
http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html

Use your mind...

Don't be ashamed. There is nothing forbidden in maths. You can use your fingers, draw in a piece of paper, use algebra tiles, cooperative learning… whatever you need!!! But most important, ALWAYS use your mind!!!

It is not inquiry if…

1) Students know what results they are "supposed" to get. 2) The questions and the steps are predetermined for them 3) The teacher is working harder than the students. Now the question is… What type of students do you wanna have?

Let's focus on what's important

Most of the time, as teachers we tend to overwhelm students with data, formulas, theorems… I am not saying that those are not important but is that the essential part? What do you think?

There are no magic bullet...

There is no magic bullet to teach math. However there are several strategies. Some of them are based on yourself as a teacher: Do you believe in your students? Do you know different ways of teaching the same concept? Have you ever heard about multiple intelligences? In this blog I pretend to share some of the strategies, ways of teaching that I use and they seem to work. But the most important it's to be open-minded and adapt everything to your class needs.