Teacher's Curriculum Institute

Many student notebooks are drab repositories of information filled with uninspired, unconnected, and poorly understood ideas. Interactive Student Notebooks, however, allow students to record information about history in an engaging way. As students learn new ideas, they use several types of writing and innovative graphic techniques to record and process them. Students use critical-thinking skills to organize information and ponder historical questions, which promotes creative and independent thinking. In Interactive Student Notebooks, key ideas are underlined in color or highlighted; Venn diagrams show relationships; cartoon sketches show people and events; timelines illustrate chronology; indentations and bullets indicate subordination; arrows show cause-and-effect relationships. Students develop graphical thinking skills and are often more motivated to explore and express high-level concepts.

1. Make sure students have appropriate materials.
To create Interactive Student Notebooks, students must bring these materials to class each day: 2. Have students record class notes on the right side of the notebook.
The right side of the notebook—the “input” side—is used for recording class notes, discussion notes, and reading notes. Typically, all “testable” information is found here. Historical information can be organized in the form of traditional outline notes. However, the right side of the notebook is also an excellent place for the teacher to model how to think graphically by using illustrated outlines, flow charts, annotated slides, T-charts, and other graphic organizers. There are many visual ways to organize historical information that enhance understanding. The right side of the notebook is where the teacher organizes a common set of information that all students must know.

3. Have students process information on the left side of the notebook.
The left side—the “output” side—is primarily used for processing new ideas. Students work out an understanding of new material by using illustrations, diagrams, flow charts, poetry, colors, matrices, cartoons, and the like. Students explore their opinions and clarify their values on controversial issues, wonder about “what if ” hypothetical situations, and ask questions about new ideas. And they review what they have learned and preview what they will learn. By doing so, students are encouraged to see how individual lessons fit into the larger context of a unit and to work with and process the information in ways that help them better understand history. The left side of the notebook stresses that writing down lecture notes does not mean students have learned the information. They must actively do something with the information before they internalize it.

Left Side Student-Processing “Output”	Right Side Teacher-Directed “Input”
Here is a simple example of the right-side, left-side orientation of the Interactive Student Notebook in action. The student began by taking class notes on late nineteenth-century industrialism on the right side of her notebook and then, for homework, completed a topical net on the corresponding left side using information from her class notes.