Chapter 5 why ask?

The first thing in the chapter that really struck me was when the author was talking about the way teachers ask questions. The author was going on and on about how important the way you ask questions are to facilitate learning and in my head I'm thinking, "stop beating the horse". Then I read the phrase, "However, in organizing lessons, teachers are inclined to plan thinking activities where the learners; potential to question the text is diminished because the teacher dominates the questioning". I paused and thought about this for a second. That has been absolutely true from the time I began school until I graduated highschool. It was not until college that I began to start thinking as an individual and questioning things. Before then I just thought about what the teacher wanted me to tell her so I can get an A. So once I made it to college, I am required to think and argue. I can remember in my politics class when my teacher asked the class the write a paper arguing a point. I still wrote what I thought he wanted to hear or what I thought he wanted in order to get an A. Reading through these strategies really helped me understand how I can teach students to become better thinkers and how to question things they normally wouldn't think about questioning.

Getting it down: Making and taking notes across the curriculum

I have never been taught how to take notes in the school environment. I am an avid notetaker. I take notes on everything. Notetaking is consistently changing for me as I continue discovering myself as a learner. I observe how my fellow classmates take notes, I observe how my teachers set up powerpoints and I make up my own notetaking strategies. I think that it is an awesome idea to teach students how to take notes because most people have no idea how to design their notes in an effective manner and it ends up being a bunch of words on a sheet of paper. Some of the strategies that were in the book I have never heard. I wish I had known this strategy when I had to do my research papers during school. This strategy seems like an amazing way to organize ideas and supporting details while reading. I found this chapter to be a very good resource for teaching students different notetaking strategies, but I have found it hard to really think of any thought provoking conversation from it.