Saving K-12 | Reform #3: Universal Manual Note-taking

Wherein a veteran teacher calls on school leaders to enact five common-sense reforms to address head-on K12's failure to educate.

May 11, 2025

Step 3: All students will manually take notes in every class every day and the teacher will be responsible for a live lecture, writing organized notes on the board as she teaches.

Parents and Board members: you have the power to force the reshaping of K12 school practices for the betterment, not just of your own children, but every child served in your local public school district. Today, my focus is on a specific instructional practice that is nothing new, but which — in the name of equity — has been eschewed in far too many middle and high school classes.

This is my third in a series of common-sense reforms that could turn American K12 education around and make our schools the envy of the world rather than the morass of conditioned non-learning into which they have devolved. This can only be effected by parents who will fight to elect School Board members who have the brains and the intestinal fortitude to push District leadership, whom they directly control, to hold school site leadership accountable for the effective implementation of easy-to-monitor practices that ensure the attentional focus of the vast majority of students, thereby also ensuring that students have an equal opportunity to learn in calm, controlled classrooms.

To that end, today we’ll look at universal manual note-taking.

Discovery learning is a lie.

K-12 students should not be in charge of "centering" the curriculum; they don't know enough to make prudent judgments of value. They can only make judgments based on their interests, and that won't scale.

Adults in the school community must make difficult curricular decisions in the face of scarcity of time, personnel, and resources. There should be a clear intent behind the selection of necessary learning and faculty should be intentional about how they teach it. At the very least, 25% of daily instructional time should be used directly instructing students. In my classroom, I spend at least like 50% of daily class time directly teaching (both through instruction and whole class review and reteaching when necessary).

A student should never walk into class knowing the teacher will offer no whole class instruction. He should never believe that he has carte blanche to screw around on his school-issued device or cell all period. The expectation should be abundantly clear that he will be required to participate meaningfully in learning, regardless of whether or not he does so verbally.

A major reason classroom behavior is so bad across the nation is that students are expected to behave, but not expected to do anything. The saying "Idle hands are the devil's workshop" should be remembered in the K12 classroom.

Students want to learn. They enjoy learning. They enjoy being handed something new, something difficult, and being helped to figure out how to use it. Take a gander at this:

https://x.com/Mr_Raichura/status/1878445428397469859

Mr. Raichura is a beast. I have no expectation that this level of instruction will ever be the norm in American schools -- even though I know plenty of American teachers who could do this if they had administrators who consistently supported them in enforcing norms of classroom behavior and removed the 0.1% of incorrigible students from the classroom.

Still, we teachers absolutely can do a hell of a lot better than we have been. Principals constantly invoke engagement, but offer zero actionable practices to effect it other than "be entertaining and build relationships." So what practical steps can we take to effect engagement across campus?

Norm the practice that all students take notes by hand.

Universal Manual Note-Taking

Learning, functionally, is the ability to recall information or how to perform certain skills. It takes multiple exposures to information for a student to recall it consistently and those repetitions need to be spaced over time, a process notes facilitate efficiently when taught and modeled by teachers.

This is not something that should be scattershot through a school based on teacher preference. This should be an expected practice of all faculty--yes, even PE teachers, many of whom now have classroom teaching days in many states.

The number one teacher complaint of all time starts with "I have said that at least ___ times" and was a legitimate gripe in the 1920s; 100 years later when vast numbers of students have severely limited attentional focus thanks to our screen-obsessed culture, we have to reclaim the reins of student focus. I believe standardized note-taking will result in the biggest payoff.

All students in the 4th grade and up should take notes on new content and skills and keep those notes as part of the expectation that they will refer to them again, both for practice over time as well as a resource to review for tests and quizzes. Those notes should be written on the board by the teacher to reinforce her points as she's speaking. This also takes the guesswork out of note-taking for students new to it.

I won't go into too much detail here, but Cornell Notes are a huge win if you're looking for long-term knowledge retention which everyone in education should be. The Cornell note-taking process must be explicitly taught across all content areas, not dumped on the ELA department. Note-taking should be modeled by the teacher daily. Students should see their teacher writing while they listen to her talk. Asking students to copy notes off slide decks is not as effective as the teacher writing on the board or via document camera on her own sheet of notebook paper.

Simultaneous listening and writing --with breaks in-between main points -- helps cement new learning. In my class, we stop after a section and write cue questions. I use the prompt: "Look at your notes. If you were a teacher writing a short answer quiz, what would be a quiz question answered by your notes?" This then becomes time for review and an opportunity to reteach as students volunteer their questions and other students answer them.

At the end of the period, students are given quiet time to write a summary that requires they, once again, review their notes. Asking students to process all the information a second (or third) time by writing a summary where they process (judge) which pieces of information must be included is another support to remembering.

Image from https://boardmix.com/tips/cornell-method-of-note-taking/

I don't care if students are in 4th grade or 12th: a teacher should not ask them to take notes on their own on a pure lecture until at least the 2nd semester of junior year and that only after several years and several content area teachers have practiced this process with them. Even then, the teacher should provide a skeleton outline of the main points in the lecture so that students know how to organize the notes they write as she speaks.

Notes Increase Student Learning

Learning is remembering. It's the ability to recall facts and or complete processes from memory. Notes increase contact points with information and processes in the following ways:

Visual reinforcement: while the teacher speaks (Contact #1), students see the notes she writes on the board (Contact #2), AND see their own handwritten notes (Contact #3)
Kinesthetic Reinforcement: while the teacher speaks, students physically record the things she writes as she says them (Contact #1 and #4)
Resource for practice: students should have notes to consult when they practice a new skill (Contact #5-7 or 8; multiple opportunities for practice being the expected norm); the teacher cannot be expected to reteach constantly.
Resource for review: notes should be where students look when preparing for a quiz/test; the teacher does most of the heavy work of discerning necessary understanding from supporting detail

Just taking notes in class, no matter how much fidelity the teacher follows the Cornell notes process with, will not be enough for every student to remember all the content. Spaced repetition of the concepts covered by the notes will be necessary as well. Still, well-planned notes are a great start in any content area.

My favorite thing to ask students when we do in-class practice is: "Where are your notes on this?" Kids actually light up when they remember they have somewhere to look that doesn't require calling attention to themselves in front of the entire class. This also incentivizes students with the worst cases of learned helplessness to take notes and complacent kids to be more conscientious about taking good notes.

Other Benefits

Notes help in a number of ways above and beyond increasing information retention, i.e., knowledge. Notes engage the student aurally, visually, and kinesthetically, so all students' attentional strengths are reinforced while they get concurrent practice in the areas where they are weaker.

Behavior

Because notes require students to be doing something in class, not just passively receiving information, notes are an effective control on behavior for students who are unfocused in class. In order to take notes, a student must focus. When the majority of the class are actively engaged in the class, the incentives for attention-seeking behaviors decrease significantly. There is social pressure on poorly behaved students to not screw up the process.

Notes give all students a concrete, universally achievable task, especially when teachers model how it should be done. Only the intentional non-learners can fail at this if the teacher does it even passably well.

For the weakest students in a class, going over the cue question process means that even if they are so dopamine-addicted their attentional focus is shot or they have learning disabilities, they can follow the progress of the lesson and have a record of their efforts as well as a resource that will support their success if/when they decide to apply new knowledge and/or practice new skills.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention that notes can become a battleground with the Special Education department and/or parents of students with IEPs and 504s, but here's how I get around that: I will give an IEP student a copy of my notes in exchange for whatever notes they took during the lesson after a brief conference where I give them feedback on their attempts by first noting what they did well. I also look specifically to praise their cue questions and we talk about where their notes were good and where they could use improvement. Yes, this is more labor for me, but over time my IEP students with ADD/ADHD become more focused and my dysgraphic/dyslexic students become more adept at taking clear, accurate notes. Some eventually stop asking to trade their notes for mine because theirs provide a stronger memory of their understanding of the material. My students on the autism spectrum tend to do very well taking notes, but usually want reinforcement when it comes to summaries. As far as I'm concerned, any additional requests for support from SpEd students are a win.

Professional Growth for Teachers

Maybe the most outsized effect of universal manual note-taking in classrooms is on the teacher side of the equation.

If the school has normed that in all content area classes students will take notes, the teachers must be a lot more intentional about how they present new information. If teachers know that instructional coaches will pop into class looking for notes on the board and, more specifically, for a clear organizational structure demonstrating the teacher (a) knows her material, (b) has thought about how best it can be explained, and (c) has broken it down into chunks that students at nearly all levels of achievement can grok, the teachers are going to become stronger over time as they wrestle with their own gaps in knowledge and recognize, from the process of notes and in-class review and practice, the gaps their students are bringing into the classroom with them.

Conclusion

Manual note-taking has been used since medieval times. It has withstood the test of time. Note-taking should be a norm across all school sites if we care about student learning.

Here are the studies you can read if you want to understand how notes support learning in more depth:

Note-taking improves student learning. (Kiewra, 2002; Rahmani & Sadeghi, 2011; Chang & Ku, 2014)
Students who take notes by hand retain more information than students who take them on a computer. (Mueller & Oppenheimer, 2014; Carter, Greenberg, & Walker, 2017)
The more notes students take, the more they remember. (Nye, Crooks, Powley, &Tripp, 1984)
Explicit teaching of note-taking methods improves student learning, especially for students with disabilities. (Boyle, 2013; Rahmani & Sadeghi, 2011; Robin, Foxx, Martello, & Archable, 1977)
Scaffolding of notes (as I recommended above in my explanation of how I use Cornell Notes) increases retention of content material. (Haydon, Mancil, Kroeger, McLeskey, & Lin, 2011)

Note-taking is something that all teachers can model and all students can do.

So let's do it.

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