Train-the-Trainer by DataHomeLab

4.4 Uncontrolled Note Taking

The student takes down what he considers important as the lesson progresses, without any assistance from the instructor. This is a feature of the lecture technique.

The defining feature of uncontrolled note taking is the locus of judgement: the trainee, not the instructor, decides what is worth writing down. The instructor delivers the content; the trainee captures whatever the trainee assesses to be important. This produces a notebook that reflects the trainee's interpretation of the lesson, not necessarily the instructor's intended emphasis. That interpretation gap is the source of both the technique's advantages (the notes are personally meaningful and well-indexed for the trainee who wrote them) and its disadvantages (important points may be missed, peripheral points may be over-recorded, and the act of writing competes with the act of listening).

Advantages

  • The act of writing can be a memory-aid itself.
  • The student will be able to find his way around the notes better.
  • The student's own notes will mean more to him than someone else's.

The first advantage is the strongest of the three. Writing engages a motor channel in addition to the auditory and visual channels the lecture itself recruits, and that additional channel adds to the encoding of the material in memory. The cognitive psychology behind this is the production effect: information that is written, spoken, or otherwise actively produced is recalled better than information that is only read or heard. The trainee who takes notes is not simply storing the lesson on paper; the trainee is also storing it in their own memory more securely than if they had only listened.

The second advantage (finding one's way around the notes) is structural. Notes generated by the trainee follow the trainee's own organising logic, with their own abbreviations, their own arrows and underlines, their own marginal queries. A précis from the instructor, however well-written, follows the instructor's organising logic, and the trainee has to translate between the two. Trainee-generated notes are also typically interleaved with the trainee's prior knowledge: a margin note saying "same as on the 320" or "different from FCOM rev 12" is exactly the kind of cross-reference the trainee needs and the précis cannot anticipate.

The third advantage (own notes mean more) is partly emotional and partly mnemonic. Notes the trainee has invested effort in producing carry the residue of that effort: the trainee remembers writing them, remembers what they were thinking when they wrote a particular line, remembers the question that prompted them. A précis that arrived without any effort from the trainee carries no such residue.

Disadvantages

  • Requires practice and experience.
  • Writing distracts the student from the lesson.
  • The important points often do not become clear until the lesson is over.
  • If the student is not following the lesson closely, the whole exercise is pointless.

The four disadvantages each surface a different failure mode the instructor needs to be alert to:

  • Practice and experience is the dependency the technique places on the trainee. A new joiner who has not developed a personal note-taking system writes either too much (transcribing whole sentences) or too little (a few words that mean nothing on later reading). Note-taking is a skill, and skill takes practice. An instructor who hands the responsibility for capture to the trainee is implicitly assuming the trainee has that skill.
  • Writing distracts is the attention-budget problem. The trainee who is mid-sentence when the instructor moves to a new point loses the new point while finishing the old one. Working memory is finite; a trainee whose attention is divided between listening and writing will lose part of the listening. The remedy is either to slow the lesson (giving the trainee writing time between points) or to use 4.5 Controlled Note Taking (where the instructor controls the writing pace explicitly).
  • Important points become clear only at the end is the structural problem. A lesson that builds toward a synthesis at the end does not give the trainee, in the moment, a reliable signal of which mid-lesson points will turn out to be load-bearing. The trainee makes a guess about importance at each point, and that guess is sometimes wrong. By the time the importance is clear, the moment for note-taking has passed.
  • Not following closely makes the exercise pointless is the prerequisite reminder. A trainee who has tuned out is not capturing notes that reflect the lesson; the trainee is producing a notebook of disconnected fragments that will be useless on review. Note-taking does not rescue an inattentive trainee; it presupposes an attentive one.

How this section connects to the training-aids material

This section sits alongside 4.5 Controlled Note Taking as the two trainee-side capture techniques the training-aids material recognises. The two are not ranked: neither is universally better. They are alternative tools the instructor selects between based on the lesson and the trainees, in the same way the per-aid sections in 4.3 Techniques for Using the More Common Training Aids are alternatives the instructor selects between based on the content and the room.

The technique also connects upward to the instructor-aid choices made earlier in 4.3 Techniques for Using the More Common Training Aids. An instructor who decides on uncontrolled note taking for a lesson should also ensure that the structural aids (the whiteboard headings, the slide titles, the section markers) are clear enough to give the trainee a reliable scaffold against which to organise the notes. An uncontrolled-note-taking lesson with a poorly structured presentation produces poorly structured notes; an uncontrolled-note-taking lesson with a clearly structured presentation produces a usable record.

Connections