HOW MICHELLE CREATES DOODLE NOTES, STRUCTURES HER LESSONS, GRADES, AND ORGANIZES STUDENT NOTEBOOKS
I teach Statistics and PAP Pre Calculus. I have been teaching high school for 19 years. In between I also worked as a stock broker, but it was a boring job and I yearned to be back in the classroom, doing something different every day , teaching, and working with others who were passionate about their career and not just a job to climb the corporate ladder and pay the bills. I’ve taught in high school in Virginia and Texas.
I live in Georgetown, TX ( just outside of Austin) which is probably the greatest city and community I have ever found. I also am an adjunct professor in the evenings at Austin community college for Developmental Math.
I am single, but have amazing parents, sister and niece who keep me busy. In my spare time I like to quilt.
I teach core stats and got tired of direct teaching. I needed another way to get my students engaged. I have used interactive
Notebooks before in Algebra 2 and in Algebra 1. So in spring 2016 I discovered doodle notes and decided to do a trial the last couple weeks of school with some very basic ones I made on my own before the Doodle Note Club even came around. The students liked them so in the summer of 2016 our curriculum group for stats decided to implement interactive notebooks and use doodle notes, foldables , and anything else we could find for stats.
I was part of TRC- Texas Regional collaborative so I attended TRC meetings and CAMT in the summer of 2016 where I got many more ideas on interactive notebooks (we are NOT a 1 to 1 school so there is virtually no technology besides calculators in the classroom- we needed other teaching tools). I spent the summer starting to take all our existing notes, homeworks, etc and convert as much as we could into doodle notes, foldables, task cards, etc that we could.
I created everything for our team and we started Day 1 and used the notebook every day- students filled up 2 entire composition notebooks for the year- they contained basically every single thing we did all year from notes to warm ups to homework to reviews to bell ringers etc. As the year went by my doodle pages got better and better. Once I joined the doodle note Club and had all the trainings and resources, I was able to greatly improve my doodle notes. The students love them.
The number one thing it has done is create organization for them, kept them on task, and paying attention. Most of them have told me if it weren’t for coloring during the down seconds, when it might take 1 or 2 students to catch up writing or answering questions, they wouldn’t have paid attention.
It kept them focused and all I would have to say is “remember the page with the car on” and it would trigger what we learned that day. They liked being able to use color for different parts of their notes and they were thrilled I was giving them permission to embellish and draw all over their page. 100% doing the notebooks and doodle pages has changed my stats classes for the better. When there were fun pictures and things to color in on the page, difficult material didn’t seem so scary to them.
Students were more focused, engaged, creative, and learning at the same time.
As far as strategies for teaching with doodle notes, my advice is…
Just try it. We have a variety of students in class and using different teaching tools appeals to all kids.
Doodle notes have changed my stats class forever and students are able to connect with math like they haven’t been able to in other traditional lecture formats. Many of them say this is the first time they have been able to understand math and that the notes give them visual clues and ways to remember what they learned. I find that , just like with interactive notebooks, if you do it- you have to do it alllll the time. That was one of my take ways from all my lectures at Camt. Students need organization and routine. If you just do something once or twice it won’t mean as much unless you stick with it, follow through, and are consistent (kind of like discipline in our classrooms).
This also puts more of an ownership on students to keep track of everything, make sure all notes are taken and homework done if they know they are going to be held accountable. We have a test grade at the end of each quarter. I was hard on them and had a rubric that usually covered about 50-60 pages in their notebook. They had to have it neat, organized, every Note filled out, every activity, homework, review done.
No credit was given if they put in a blank worksheet or notes. I kept a box of all the extra copies and it was the students responsibility to get the missing papers they needed from that or get them off our schoology or google classroom site where all the blank copies were as well as pictures of each page and table of contents for each unit. There was no excuse for them to fall behind.
I started doodle Note Club I think in November or December. I really like all the tutorials and resources. I have made all of my doodle notes because there isn’t a lot out there for core level stats. Sometimes I have started with the templates and other times I completely make up my own. I have tried to make them both in PowerPoint and word and it varies depending on what I want to do. I have downloaded tonnnnsssss of fonts and my students love them. I also have bought a couple of packages from Teachers Pay Teachers for various foldables. I combine many times doodle Note templates and clip art from the doodle Note Club with the foldables.
I try if I can to have different things in the lesson- a foldable and maybe a short doodle page- it really depends on the type of lesson. A lot of time with vocabulary I will combine doodle notes and foldables. Other times it’s just necessary for them to have a doodle page to fill out.
I don’t neccesarily have any tricks for PowerPoint, that I still would like to learn more about- I can always learn more. I will say that many times I have had to do my doodle notes on my home computer because I’m not allowed to download fonts at school. I then have to make a PDF of it in order to download to our folders at school. There are a few times that even with turning my word or PowerPoint into a PDF, it still doesn’t transfer correctly to school. So many times I’ll make the pages at home and print a blank copy so that when I get to school if it doesn’t look the way I want because of schools formatting, I can scan in my blank copy so that I have electronic copies in our schools folder. I use a program on my phone called Turbo Scan- it was a couple of dollars in the App Store but so worth it. Because some of the images are copyrighted or for personal use only and not for sale, they are on student password protected platforms- like schoology and google classroom (I use both) so that only students have access to them and others out in the world aren’t selling copyrighted material and It’s for my student use only.
It has worked great in my room. All copies are sitting on the shelf when students to walk in- they have a routine to pick everything up. Then they can go to their group and even now, most get cutting right away , get the glue , tape, and markers out and start working away. Every students’ page is the same so as we do the notes, foldables, etc I tell them
Immediately what page that goes on and they glue or tape immediately.
Then if we assign homework, I make them write it down on the blank page where they will glue it in later. Some days my kids have a tonnnnnn to cut out and color , but once they get in a routine and know what I expect, everything usually runs like clockwork- I’ve never run out of time for notes.
I don’t let them dilly dally and they know they need to keep up.
The kids usually start coloring as soon as they get their notes while I’m doing all the housekeeping items at the beginning of class. A lot of time too, they are usually their own self monitor and color in between me talking or doing examples. They’ve learned to multitask and it keeps them on task. Believe it or not, by doing this my kids usually don’t have their phones out while taking notes.
The draw of coloring while we’re taking notes usually outweighs taking selfies and texting their friends. Don’t get me wrong, cell phones are a pain, but my students use them a whole lot less this year doing Notes, activities and the notebook. They are kept busy and on task and worry less about their phones.
I love doodle notes and I’ll keep using them forever. I am always looking for new things I can do (on a Teachers budget when we don’t have the technology everyone thinks the schools are full off— ummmm no) to help students learn.
Grab Michelle’s awesome pages that she has graciously shared in the Share Zone!