Marzano Lessons

I'm going to take a wild guess here and say that we'll see quite a few of these lessons today. I worked with my AP Literature students on Summarizing and Note-taking. They consider themselves done with high school and they don't realize yet what lies in wait for them in college. We talked generally about the sheer volume of information that they must process and absorb in their college classes. We also talked about strategies they have employed in high school and how they might cope with the speed of presentation that they'll encounter. High school students like to ask teachers to repeat things. That's not going to happen.

Anderson and Hidi make three generalizations on summarizing based on the available research. 1. Students must delete, substitute, and keep certain information 2. To do this effectively, they must analyze the information at a fairly deep level. 3. Being aware of the explicit structure of informaiton is an aid to summarizing.

I asked my students to organize their notes in a two-column system where they take lecture notes in the left column and leave the right side clear for re-processing. We talked through examples of information that one might delete, substitute, or keep. We also practiced applying background information to do effective screening of new material. Then the students utilized their skills in note-taking.

We embarked on a lecture-discussion considering a segment of Emerson's "Nature" essay where he defines Art, Beauty, and Nature. I asked the students to use those views as a lens through which they would view twelve poems from British masters who deal with time, beauty, and the transitory nature of life. Among them were "To an Athlete Dying Young," "To His Coy Mistress," "When I Have Fears That I May Cease To Be," and "Ode on a Grecian Urn." The students were required to listen to teacher comments, respond to them verbally, engage each other in discussion, and take notes at the same time. Their notes were to effectively record key material while screening other information. The students were then asked to revisit those notes before the next class and reprocess their information, adding pieces of a discussion that might now seem relevant, but they had no time then to record or even add their own reflections that tie together material in a relevant way.

The purpose of reprocessing the material is to give the students opportunity to identify the structure of the information, see connections, and identify ongoing themes that would be important in mastering the information. They were also asked to do online searches of references that they did not understand, but that appeared to be important.

The students handed in their notes after two sessions of process and reprocess. I then identified where they had successfully made substitutions, grouping, and structural identification. Some of the students did very well in screening and articulating information, while others seem to be on their way to being typical college freshmen (skill not yet acquired). Plain effort also was a factor in how succesfully they processed and summarized.

I've reached the moral limit for length of a blog. I'll include the other lesson in another blog.