Listening Skills in the Library

During the school year, I've chronicles my efforts to teach study skills to 150 AP World History students. At some points, note taking was kind of like eating brussel sprouts, and but we improved from there.

This week, we switched gears a little bit to talk about listening skills. Specifically, we focused on 8 habits of bad listeners and how to ID the important stuff in a lecture.


Bad habits we covered included:
 
We also talked about signal words - cues and clues that help the listener understand where they are in a lecture.

Following my 20 minute mini-lesson, the teacher delivered a lecture on Chinese dynasties. This was the FIRST TIME most students had ever taken notes purely from listening, without the help of a cloze or fill-in-the-blank activity (What's up with getting to April of your 9th grade year without taking lecture notes?!? Why did we phase that out - it's such a great critical thinking/listening activity?!?).

To help support the students, I took notes as the teacher presented, and projected them onto a side wall in the classroom. When they got stuck, they just glanced over to see if they were on the right track. On Monday, we'll continue with more of the same and teach them how to use the Evernote app.

Here's a list of the resources I used to help create this lesson:
Follow this link to my presentation -- feel free to adapt it for your own uses. 

Any other librarians out there teaching study skills?

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