Process Learning & Teaching with Notebooks

While the content on each worksheet is meaningful and necessary, many students blindly fill them in just to “get their work done.” If you’ve ever struggled with students’ disregard for process learning on a worksheet or Google Doc, I’d like to suggest switching your presentation of content into a notebook. It’s time to bring students off the fill-in-the-blank assembly line and into engaged thinking for each learning task. Moving process learning into a notebook naturally creates pauses in a student’s response time. Notebooks contain content notes, exemplars, writing inventions, reflections, and the day-to-day practice that allows for process learning.  Notebooks are playgrounds for risk-taking and thinking. They become archives preserving learning in real-time and providing evidence for reflection and feedback. While I teach ELA, I believe that this system would work well across any discipline.