Cornell Notes: Encouraging Active Study in the Media and Film Classroom

I love notes. I always have done. I'm one of those irritating stereotypes that has fourteen different shades of purple post it note and every pastel highlighter under the sun. I've always been this way. At GCSE, I laboured countless hours over copious notes. I had every shade of highlighter imaginable, and they all ended up on every page. Science was the worst. I would draw and render a beautiful diagram of a heart, spending hours on it, forgetting the fact that I already knew the heart pretty well and it was far more valuable spending my time on other, less familiar sections of the course. But they didn't have pretty diagrams. And I knew this bit, so I could concentrate on making it pretty.

This continued to A Level, where studying five courses (two Sciences, so a plethora of diagram drawing opportunities) meant the workload was unsustainable. I wrote so many notes and worked every evening and weekend, and yet my grades were not reflecting that. Why not? I became disenfranchised and lacklustre, losing the joy I used to have in learning. I fell out of love with education, and it carried on without me. Before long, the notes I had neglected to make piled up and became insurmountable. I didn't get terrible A Level grades. But I know I could have done better.

This is why the art of study means a lot to me. I've been there, in the depths of erroneous note taking tactics, and it's stressful. And I see students making the same mistakes as me, simply because they don't know better. So, as part of my rethinking of our Media teaching and learning, I want to explore the explicit teaching and modelling of note-taking.

Media, as we all know, is a content heavy subject. There's a lot of contextual information to explore about the case studies before we get into the analysis, and then there are the copious critical perspectives that could be applied, evaluated and considered in relation to these texts. It's not easy going. As well as this, quite often the subject lends itself to seminar style discussion and note-taking. I am very guilty of simply saying 'take notes on this' or, 'note this down' without stopping to consider that students may not actually know how to effectively do that. Sure enough, may of them get you to stop on the slide you are presenting while they copy down every word, or ask you to repeat yourself seven times while they note every detail. They don't need every detail, and all they are doing by spending the extra time getting it is giving themselves an extra job to do by having to condense it for revision later. And let's be honest, they won't condense it, they will copy it onto revision cards in full and panic at the stack of 85 cards they have to learn for Section A.

This is where Cornell Notes comes in. It's a personal preference, and it may not work for everyone, but introducing it as an option in class and modelling how to use it gives students some experience of an active study method. As well as this, introducing Cornell Notes introduces some of the principles of metacognition that make it work, which allows students to think about how they can include those principles in their own workflow.

As we are still online, I have made videos outlining how to use Cornell Notes in our classes for note taking and also for planning essays. The videos are directed largely at sixth form, but also work in some contexts at GCSE. when we are back face to face, I plan on getting them to set their exercise books out in the Cornell Notes format and properly try it. I hope, through using it over a longer period, that their summery skills will improve and their focus on key terminology will improve too. Through planning essays in this way, I also hope their structuring and signposting in extended writing will be refined.

This is a small change that needs to become a habit in order to see results, and that is tough at the moment. However, through regular teacher modelling, I can at least get students familiar with the format and its benefits, even if they don't use it themselves yet. I hope to have all Media students using this method (where applicable) in lessons, or if not this, a consistent method that works for them. This will not only set them up for success in their Media qualification, but also in their next steps, whatever they may be.