Multicolumn Notes

The purpose of this strategy is to help students learn how to infer,

interpret, draw conclusions, and analyzing the author’s purpose. This strategy is

adaptable in all contents because it can be modified to several columns to

better suit the subject matter. This strategy specifically can be adapted to the

math discipline by writing down key phrases in one column and the

mathematical interpretation in the other column. This note taking strategy

during reading would help students organize their thoughts and scaffolds their

thinking by giving them an outline of what they should be recording. This

strategy also supports critical literacy because it has students actively read a

text and make judgments of what they think is most important or what is trying

to be conveyed.

This strategy would be best introduced through teacher modeling. It may

be hard for the students to know what the most important ideas are so the

teacher should first demonstrate how to distinguish the important and minor

ideas. Another way to help students get use to this way of notetaking is to

have students first summarize the text and their thinking during the reading.

Once this method becomes familiar to the students the columns in the notes

can be expanded to be more content specific.

Text Evidence What is Being Symbolic Math

Asked? Representation
Daniels, H. (2014). Subjects matter: Exceeding standards through powerful content-area
reading. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.