Interactive Note-Taking in Social Studies Class

“History is boring…”

If you are adept at listening to students, you can hear the melody in that phrase. Truly, for me as a middle school social studies teacher, these words have been music to my ears at the start of each school year. Education is like good food: Sometimes you don’t know you like a dish until it’s been prepared the right way.

On that note, welcome to my social studies classroom.

Over the years, I’ve learned that teaching history can be tricky for teachers who love history. Yes, passion is infectious. However, we social studies teachers don’t always share the spotlight. So often, we rely on lengthy dictation of notes, loquacious rhetoric, and narrow narration to transmit information to distracted adolescents. A classroom of children who yearn to chat may seem to be at odds with an obligation to cover a dense unit of content. However, I’ve learned to reconcile these equally important needs by using an integrated note-taking and discussion strategy.

Kids want to talk. As teachers, we should let them. Here’s the key to properly pitching your notes and sharing the stage while doing so.

1. Limit notes to 15 minutes at a time

A child’s attention span is finite. While studies on the adolescent brain and attention vary, postpandemic classrooms seemingly yield shorter student attention spans than ever. At best, middle school students can sustain focus for just over 10 minutes, while high school students can pay attention a little longer. Still, this ability is continually developing from adolescence into adulthood.

We do our students a disservice by fighting the science of their brain development with extended periods of lecture and notes. To capitalize on student engagement, sustained activities should not exceed 15 minutes at a time. If the content is particularly dense, break it into smaller-sized tasks or note-taking sessions. I like to use a timer to both hold myself accountable and give students a collective finish line to look forward to.

2. Incorporate questioning into note-taking

History is not a fixed narrative and should not be taught as such. Merely presenting information for the purpose of rote memorization is boring from where our students sit. For us as teachers, it is incumbent upon us to transcend what Paulo Freire calls the “banking model of education” in order to facilitate a safe and challenging space for students to grow in the realm of critical thought. Moreover, standards-based social studies instruction requires students to analyze and evaluate, not simply recall what a teacher has deposited.

By infusing questions into my presentations during the lesson design process, I learned to mitigate my own continuous teacher talk, disrupt monotony, and increase student engagement through dialogue. I started creating question slides to facilitate student discourse during the note-taking portion of the lesson, and I inserted them after every one or two lecture slides. The next section has some ideas for how to construct these questions.

3. Mix up your questioning strategies

Using a basic middle school social studies lesson on Hammurabi’s Code, here are some examples of questioning strategies you can infuse into your notes. (These strategies can plug and play with any middle or high school social studies content you are teaching.)

Use Bloom’s Taxonomy to create a higher-order question related to the content of a slide. Many of the eye-for-an-eye-themed laws in Hammurabi’s Code always generate curiosity from students. After sharing some of these laws, I may choose to target the “analyze” level of Bloom’s Taxonomy and prompt the class with this question: “Compare and contrast these laws with what you know about American laws. What are some similarities? What are some differences?”

Polarize the class. Divide and conquer by creating a scenario from a law in Hammurabi’s Code. “Justin and Noelani get into an argument. Noelani completely loses it on Justin and breaks his leg. Hammurabi’s Code says that Noelani must now get her leg broken as a punishment for breaking Justin’s leg.” (Be sure to commit and really sell the plot.) Challenge the class to agree or disagree with this scenario and, most important, explain why. Be prepared to follow up for key takeaways: “What are the benefits of this kind of law? What are some downsides for laws like these?”

Connect the content to the bigger essential question of the unit. I love a good essential question (EQ). Push another scenario or review a few laws, and circle the class back to the EQ introduced at the onset of the unit: “Should our freedom have limits? If so, what should they be and why?” Revisiting the EQ is always a great way to end a note-taking session by affording the class an opportunity to reflect on what has been discussed and apply new understandings to a familiar question.

Challenge the class to infer what might happen next. This is a question strategy that all social studies teachers should cozy up to. In this instance, share Hammurabi’s biography and explore motivations for the code. “Hammurabi effectively unified his empire by creating a common set of laws for all citizens. What do you think happened after he died? Explain why you say this using the evidence from our notes.” In addition to the critical thinking benefits of teaching students to infer, these questions cultivate curiosity for what comes next, priming young minds to lock in.

Each of these questions can be paired with an interactive strategy. For instance, after you ask the class, “What might happen next?” facilitate a “stop and jot.” In addition to building up students in the skill of inference, I love to hear students make predictions based on their current understandings and then compare those predictions with what actually happened according to historical records.

There is no shortage of interactive discussion strategies you can pair with your questions. The key here is to resist the urge to weigh in. The classroom cannot revolve around us teachers. Rather, allow the students to do all of the cognitive work, and listen actively to (1) effectively facilitate the various student perspectives and (2) identify student understandings, language, and context to leverage learning for the remainder of the lesson and beyond.

For me, the symphonic sound of student thought in the form of dialogue and discourse illuminates my very being. Commit to taking a hard pass on the passive classroom. Let the kids talk.