Interactive Notebooks

What is an Interactive Notebook?

Student interactive notebooks

Interactive notebooks are traditionally built into blank composition books or constructed using loose leaf paper in a three ring binder. It aids students in organizing input (lectures, notes, group activities) and output activities (homework, reflection activities, other practice), making materials organized, accessible, and easy to use. They typically contain a table of contents in the front to organize topics and assignments. Although many of the mathematics teachers use the traditional composition book, I have adapted the idea to construct individual notebooks for every unit. I've found my students do better breaking the year into smaller chunks, and the new unit allows time for reflection, revision of habits, and new goals. If they have a bad 3 weeks, they can start over in their next notebook. My TAs build them and I provide them free of charge at the start of each unit. My notebooks contain a page of reflective questions in the front, a table of contents, section to complete the daily warm-up, a page for each day of instruction with a blank sheet opposite (this means no double sided printing for instruction days), and a grading rubric on the last page. Some units have all the graphic organizers pre-printed, but now that we have switched to the Common Core standards, I haven't had time to create all the handouts before the unit, so pretty much all the pages are blank. I make some student books with graph paper to accommodate students with disabilities or severe organizational/penmanship challenges. Other students have a sheet of lined paper they slide behind the page to help provide structure on the black paper (their idea, and it is genius!).

Why Interactive Notebooks?

Fact: the prefrontal cortex, or executive functioning center of the brain, is not fully developed until the mid-twenties. So why do we expect high school students to have the whole organization & planning thing all figured out? I spent my first year of teaching agonizing over lost and missing notes & assignments. If they did manage not to lose it, it went straight into the trash can as soon as it was handed back.

Luckily, our science department is filled with rockstar teachers. A physics teacher and chemistry teacher had been using interactive notebooks with great success, and I immediately knew they had to be adapted for the mathematics classroom. Midway through my second year, I dove right in and it is by far the best decision I have made in my entire teaching career. I'm in my 3rd year of implementation and have used them for both Algebra 1 and Geometry. 

Being an unexpected math teacher, I was shocked when I started teaching high school and my students didn't do homework. SHOCKED. This doesn't happen at these proportions in elementary school, so I naturally I took it very personally. Am I so bad a teacher they didn't understand the lesson? Am I so boring they don't care? Do they hate me so much they are trying to get me fired by failing to learn the materials? Finally I stumbled upon the correct question: How can I motivate and engage my students to learn both inside and outside the classroom? Interactive notebooks were the answer.

The interactive notebook accomplishes three BIG things that increases student likelihood for success: Increases engagement in classroom and homework activities, facilitates reflection on the macro and micro levels, and helps students organize their work in way that empowers them to their best. On Back to School Night & at parent conferences I introduce them as an accountability, encouragement, and support tool. Tutors and support teachers around campus rely on their structure to help my students. No exaggeration, interactive notebooks were a game changer for me (and my students).

Creating an Environment for Interactive Notebooks

A surprising number of my students arrive to school with NOTHING. No backpack, no notebook, not even a pencil. The likelihood of this student taking useful notes and engaging in classroom activities? Pretty small. Now, put a pencil box on this student's desk with scissors, highlighters, erasers, glue sticks, protractors, and compasses. That box makes a powerful statement: you want EVERYONE to learn, and at HIGH LEVELS. People will tell you that you are denying kids the valuable lesson of responsibility, that giving them everything enables them to be lazy and apathetic. Remember that prefrontal cortex? Before it is fully developed, it requires a lot more energy to do little things, like remember a calculator, highlighters, and color pencils (not to mention the problem solving that comes with math). I view my room as a learning lab, not just for math, but for school skills as well. I encourage them to try the methods we use in their other classes. I show them that there is payoff for being prepared and organized. Pretty soon, they start bringing highlighters for their other classes. Former students stop by to make interactive notebooks for their new math classes that don't use them.

 The supplies can get expensive. We were told by our principal that we can no longer offer extra credit for donating supplies (despite the fact it was nominal and never really changed a grade), and my department chair told me there is no money in the budget to restock the boxes for second semester. I spend a lot of time begging family to donate basics (my mother is our angel), and parents of students I've had multiple years usually send in supplies here and there. I make sure to go to any supply give-a-ways and hit up the back-to-school sales hard to build up enough to get us through the year. If your school can not financially support this, you will have to get creative. Be careful spending your own money; the kids steal and destroy the supplies (even the good kids have bad days). I notice when my classroom management gets relaxed, the destruction and theft increase as well. 

Notebooks can get messy. Any teacher who has ever done interactive notebooks will tell you the secret is in pre-cutting the handouts as often as possible. Another idea I plan to try next semester is putting a small scrap bucket in the middle of each table group so bits of paper don't go into the pencil boxes or on the floor.

Most of all, students need to see value in maintaining a high quality notebook. Out Geometry team allows students to use notes on assessments, so my students are motivated to work hard on notebooks not just as a study tool, but as a test taking tool as well. When notes are missing, or homework is sloppy or incomplete, they have nothing to fall back on. Being able to use the notebook on the test is a HUGE motivator for my students. Students get attached to their work because for many, it is the first time they have something to be proud of in a math class.

Inside the Interactive Notebook

The input/output model for my interactive notebook is very simple: notes/class activity on the right, daily homework assignment on the left. My classes are composed of many English language Learners at ALL levels, as well as mainstreamed special education students, so the need for scaffolding through graphic organizers is critical. Nearly every day, I create a graphic organizer for my students to paste in. Sometimes it support vocabulary development, other days problem solving or seeing patterns/relationships between ideas. We have a routine, and if I ever miss a detail, the kids are all over it. Our learning objective is always at the top of the page under the title, and we constantly refer back to it through the lesson. I frequently ask the kids if what we have done so far fulfills the objective. We use the objective as we write to predict relationships and solutions, as well as frame the language for our responses. Any time we have a new word, we draw a picture or diagram to support it. Sometimes it even gets silly as we find clever ways to remind ourselves what is important. I remind them that this is not a math skill, everything we do can be done in any other class with any other teacher. I try to train them to be actively engaged with the lesson, no matter who is giving it to them. We end each lesson with a summary statement at the bottom of the page, answer a question related to the objective. I give students an optional word bank or sentence frame on the board to help them put their ideas into words. Students struggling to develop their mathematical language use all the scaffolds. My high achievers use the scaffold as a way to check their work. 

Modeling and language are the two most important features of the notebook. Students tell me they have never written so much in a math class. They also tell me this is the first year they have taken math notes that make sense, that they are proud of their notes, and that they find their notes helpful then completing assignments, studying, and taking tests. I am extremely impressed with how much my students' mathematical literacy grows over the course of the year, and the interactive notebook is a key component of their growth. The input side isn't just vocab or just examples of how to do a problem. It contains explanations of processes and relationships that promote sense-making. This aspect of the notebook is very important.

Class notes: objective, vocab/theorem, modeling, sentence frame, and summary. No graphic organizer provided, but all their notes look just like this. Amazing!

Graphic organizer for reading assignment on writing paragraph proofs. Students read an article, completed the outline in small groups, and reported back to class. Their versions were highlighted better, an they let me know it!

Graphic organizer on left side summarizing process, student practice on right. GO folds down to reveal learning objective, summary (not shown) at bottom of page.

Notes for algebraic process. Objective at top, vocab w/diagram, then step by step example with explanation & justification that we did as a class (they did the steps...they did not copy me doing the steps!)

Lastly, it is important I note that I model EVERYTHING that goes into the notebook under my document projector. They follow along as I write the notes, show them what highlight, and explain why we are organizing and emphasizing. Every students knows what their notes should look like, and because I do this with every class period, each class has it's own copy in the front of the room to reference if they are absent or just want to check their notes against the class set. In the beginning, I do most of the organizational work, but as the year goes on, I ask the kids to predict what should be highlighted, or what goes next in the notes. I also rely on card calls to have students work through every step of a problem; I never "give" them the answers or "tell" them how to do it. This aspect of the notebook keeps them actively engaged the ENTIRE period and it helps them have ownership over the lesson as they play the teacher for a moment. Some teachers feel this sucks the creativity out (it might) and fails to teach them to be independent notetakers (see note of prefrontal cortex development). If I were teaching gifted learners, I would not provide the scaffolds I do. If the language is not accessible, the math becomes mystical instead of magical. The structure and routine is our access point, so by the end of the year we can get creative, think critically, and have fun. Without the notebooks, we were so burnt out and discouraged by the end of the year the magic was gone and math wasn't fun for anyone.

Grading Notebooks

Student reflection inside cover of interactive notebook. Good feedback about tech compatibility, insight about why HW is not getting done & where student needs help.

Inside the cover, there is a reflection/self assessment that students are required to complete before I will grade their notebooks. Students use the rubric in the back to grade their own work and answer questions that give me insight into the quality of their work and the honesty behind the self grading. I collect each notebook after the test and give each student a score out of 10. We do it together for the first 2 notebooks, then I expect them to self assess on their own the night before the test.

The kids are pretty accurate in their grading. They are brutally honest about whether they did homework, and after a few rounds, you know who grades too hard and who inflates hoping you aren't paying attention. I use the score to do my own grading, quickly flipping through for completion, organization, and attention to detail. I don't look for correct answers; I mostly look to see if they did the homework, if they graded their homework (shows if they did the HW on time or copied it from someone after the fact), if they went back and fixed mistakes in their HW, if their daily notes are complete and highlighted, and if they included the daily summary at the end of each lesson. It takes me 1-2 minutes per notebook to read, comment, and grade, which I don't find burdensome. I usually grade them in the front of the room while another class is testing, and kids usually get a score +/- 1 point of own assessment. Without the self assessment, notebooks would take forever to grade (hence why I do not accept them if the reflection is not complete). The reflection also requires students to be honest with themselves about the quality of their work and the effort they are putting forth. I get to leave comments, get feedback about what challenged students the most, and leave notes of inspiration specific to each students goals. 

Future Notebooks

I would really like to move back towards standards based grading, and would like to explore how to incorporate that into the notebooks. This would include adding progress monitoring elements, perhaps to the table of contents. I think if there was a running record of how a student was scoring on formative assessments, as well as an added element of self assessment beyond marking correct/incorrect, students would be more motivated to complete assignments, as well as go back to fix their errors. Seeing data could also help students be more precise in their reflection and more accurately predict their score on summative assessments. 

I also want to change my approach to homework overall. Lessons need to be shorter and students need more time in class to practice. Homework needs to be finishing the practice, not starting all over again in isolation outside of the classroom. I really liked how homework sets were differentiated for my Algebra classes, but I am struggling to realize this for geometry, as that course is much more textbook driven due to diagrams and shapes. Ideally, my geometry students would have a choice of the level of challenge they feel prepared for each day (this worked incredibly well in the Algebra classes), but again, the textbook limits this and the workload to create differentiated Geometry problem sets is not within my current ability.

The notebooks are continually adapting to student needs, workload constraints, and my own professional development. I'm excited to see where else they will grow!