After meeting (or becoming reaquainted with) my twelve students, I moved on to the class overview. About half the class is new to IEW writing methods, and one of them struggles with dyslexia, so I’ll have to watch my pace carefully. Since I’ve covered the class overview already, I won’t bore you with the details again.
Because most students struggle with extracting information from a source, my first priority is always teaching the key word outline (KWO). I put our standard KWO on the board (chalkboard by the way—have I mentioned how much I prefer whiteboards?!). For those who have not taken my classes, I explained the rules for key word outlines—3 words or less; numbers, symbols, and abbreviations don’t count, and first line is the topic.
For this first exercise, I used an article about the da Vinci surgical robot from Popular Mechanics. After reading through the article, I briefly touched on limiting notes. All students struggle with knowing what to take away and what to leave behind. I can see it in their faces, the realization, the freedom that it’s ok not to take away everything. I always start these exercises with a paragraph, making sure they take fewer notes than the number of sentences in the article. In this case we had 10 sentences in the article and I only asked them for 5-7 facts. Once they understood they didn’t have to rewrite everything, we were ready to take notes.
Sentence by sentence we reread the article and the students gave me key words. We decided which sentences to skip altogether. Not only did we practice taking key words and limiting notes, we discussed vocabulary—I love when students ask me what words mean—like mainstay and trailblazer.
Once our key words were down on the board, we went back and verbally put the key words into sentences. When someone gave me a sentence that sounded a bit awkward or didn’t quite capture the meaning, other students graciously jumped in and helped with their suggestions. Some students remember additional information from the article and included that with their notes, something I see happening all the time.
Finally, we spent about 10 minutes talking about bibliographies. From the first class, I require my students to include a bibliography with every assignment. For a single paragraph assignment, they include it at the bottom of their outlines.
I think it is going to be a great semester! Stay tuned for some examples when they turn in their papers next week.
Sources:
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/health/med-tech/4332259
