This is more class work that I'm reposting. It is definitely a post strictly for you teachers out there - I can't imagine anyone else being interested. This is all about Double Entry Diaries, which I learned about from Cris Tovani's fantastic book, Do I Really Need to Teach Reading?
I want to talk about how I introduced double entry diaries to my class (you may know these as Cornell notes.
Here's what I did: I made a big (about my height) "double entry diary" on my whiteboard using blue tape. On the left I wrote "data (facts and ideas)", and on the right I wrote "questions, connections, and predictions". I had all my students make a double entry diary in their notebooks. For this first one I went heavy on the ceremony, instructing that they first fold their paper in half lengthwise, then carefully trace a vertical line up the crease.
At this point I started playing a podcast about the first paleoAmericans. I stopped it frequently, and had people come up with entries - I solicited lots of responses, so that one piece of "data" often had several questions, connections, and predictions attached to it. Because I wasn't the one reading, I was able to be "one of the note-takers". I think it would have felt very different had I been reading and then pausing to elicit notes from others.
For the most part, this introduction worked very well: students took to the structure very quickly, and the predictions drove interest in "what would come next". The problem was that it went very slowly, and if we listened for more than a few minutes, lots of key points got completely lost. I ended up listening over two days (one hour each) and it got tedious. It would have been better possibly to listen to it once in its entirety, taking notes, and then go back and listen to longer chunks at a time.
Overall, I really liked teaching reading through listening - it meant everyone was at the same pace and we were doing something communally, and it meant that everyone knewexactly where the notes were coming from - they didn't even need to flip to a particular page, because they'd all just heard the source material.