There are many ways that your students can gather information and take notes in the middle school science classroom. You can have students take notes independently or you can give a lesson through direct instruction.
The direct instruction model can be an effective approach if done correctly. What is the direct instruction meaning? This is a teaching method where the teacher provides structured guidance of the content to students.
If you have gained your students’ interest using WONDER strategies as a part of the WOW Factor, then you have already created curiosity and anticipation that will set the stage for your students to soak in the content you are about to give them.
There are many ways that interactive notes can be used in a direct instruction classroom. What are some examples of direct instruction? Here are three different ideas! You can choose the approach that best fits your students’ needs.
Direct Instruction and Traditional Note-Taking
One direct instruction approach is to give a lecture to students as they write down the notes that they need.
They can take the approach to writing every single thing down. They can also write down the key points. In addition, they can take notes through the Cornell notes approach so they can organize the ideas of the presentation.
Interactive lessons are different. How? They include science content that is arranged using researched-based strategies. In addition, there are embedded activities included that allow for students to process information.
Here’s an example of a lesson on Heat Transfer:
There is a slide that includes the following:
“Fast particles in warmer objects make slower molecules in cooler objects move faster until all particles are moving the same speed (same temperature).
This is called thermal equilibrium.”
Students can either write down these notes or write down the important information (which is highlighted in the slide).
After they take down their notes, there are questions to be answered to help them to process this information.
One of these examples includes a multiple choice question: “The state of a system in which all objects are the same temperature is called:”
Through this approach, students can take down their notes and keep them in their notebook. They can answer the embedded questions as a class.
Interactive Lessons with Guided Notes
Another approach to direct instruction teaching is to give students the content through lecture, and students can record and keep their notes with the guided notes provided.
Each interactive lesson comes with guided notes!
As you go through the lesson with your students, they can fill in the missing pieces in their notes. This is a common way to teach a direct instruction lesson.
The embedded questions are included in the guided notes! In that way, as you are teaching, students can work through these questions and record the answers on their own notes.
After the lesson is complete, they can store these in a binder to review them as needed.
Interactive Lessons with Pear Deck
One approach to direct instruction that I personally have not used, but I know of some people that have, is to use these interactive lessons with PearDeck.
It is designed to easily transform lessons into an interactive platform. As you have the lesson on your screen, it is also on your students’ screen as well.
As you go through the lessons and students work through the embedded questions, you can get real-time feedback to who understands and who does not!
Although I haven’t used this myself, others that have used interactive lessons have told me how easy it was to transfer the interactive lessons to PearDeck and how they loved using them for this purpose!
Which one of these direct instruction strategies will you use? There are many direct instruction benefits, including providing clarity instruction, teacher guidance, and efficiency in knowledge transfer!
You can also use interactive lessons in science centers!
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