My Teaching Notebook

I realized that for all the years I have had this blog I am pretty sure I have never shared my teaching notebook with you. And that’s just crazy because it’s a fundamental part of who I am. My teaching notebook is nothing fancy, and there’ not right way to use one. I hope you find a little inspiration in learning about my approach!

What’s It For?

I buy a notebook for every class I teach. They can be as plain or as fancy as you want them to be. I generally buy a traditional. Mine come from Target and look like this:

I pick whatever color speaks to me. On the inside cover, I write the name of the class and semester to tell them apart. I told you — I keep it very simple.

But back to the point. What is it for? My teaching notebook allows me to do several things:

Basically, it keeps all my ideas about my class organized in one place. Sure, I could do this electronically (and I also have Pinterest boards for my classes as well), but I find that I like being able to have a physical collection of it all. Plus, I can carry it around with me and easily add ideas to it whenever and wherever.

The Advantages

But in my notebook I have the chunks with the time written out next to them. For example, a class I taught last year met from 5:00–7:50. Here is an example of what chunking looked liked in my notebook:

5:00–5:05: Overview of the day

5:05–6:00: Discussion: Defining Digital Literacies and Digital Competence

6:00–6:10: Break

6:10–6:30: Inside Maddie’s Classroom

6:30–6:50: The Digital Challenge

6:50–7:45: Explore Projects

Now, when you look at that you may not see a whole lot of chunking. But keep in mind that I have a website running alongside this where my students have more details. For example, the first main activity (discussion on digital literacies and competence) is broken down for the students like this:

I don’t need to hand write all that out in a notebook. What I need, to keep me in check, is a basic time frame to make sure I am on top of where we need to be. I need a page I can glance down at during the class and orient myself quickly. I may even note start and stop times in my notebook so I don’t forget. You can see here though how one task that lasted almost an hour is broken down into chunks in the class overview of the website.

Great Ideas I Have Yet to Implement

The back part of my notebook is reserved for great ideas I want to implement in the future. These ideas typically come to me during or right after teaching a class. I realize that the experience could have been better if I had done X differently. Usually, there is no time to go back and make the change (the time has passed). However, I know from experience that I will not remember my brilliant idea in the future.

So I flip to the last few pages of my notebook and jot down whatever I need to jot down to preserve the memory. When I am planning to teach the class again, I can review these notes and make the appropriate modifications if I want. It’s a simple and efficient approach.

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