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An education degree asks you to be a student and a teacher at the same time. In the morning you're taking notes on learning theory. In the afternoon you're in a classroom placement, watching a teacher manage thirty kids, and that evening you're drafting a lesson plan you'll actually teach.
Those three kinds of work need three kinds of notes. Here's how to set each one up so your coursework, your placement and your future teaching all draw on the same notebook.
Set up notebooks around what you do
Education students often end up with notes scattered across course binders, placement handouts and loose lesson drafts. Try organizing by the kind of work instead:
- A theory notebook for your foundations, psychology and methods courses.
- A placement notebook for observations, mentor teacher meetings and reflections. Keep it separate, because it contains information about real students.
- A lesson plan notebook for drafts, revisions and plans you've taught.
Whatever you choose, keep it the same for every semester. By student teaching, you'll want to find a strategy you read about two years ago.
Theory notes that connect to practice
Education courses introduce many theorists and frameworks: Piaget's stages, Vygotsky's zone of proximal development, Bloom's taxonomy, behaviorist and constructivist views of learning, and more. Exams and papers rarely ask you to just define them. They ask what they'd look like in a classroom.
For each theory, write four things:
- The idea in one or two sentences, in your own words.
- Who it's from, and roughly when.
- What it looks like in a classroom. A specific teacher move: grouping, questioning, scaffolding, feedback.
- Limits and critiques your course raises.
That third line is the one to protect. When you write lesson plans and teaching philosophy statements later, you'll pull from it constantly. Turning these pages into flashcards works well too. See active recall.
Classroom observation notes
Observation is a skill, and most programs teach it on purpose. A few habits make your notes more useful and more professional.
Separate what you saw from what you think. Split the page into two columns. On the left, write only what happened: "T asked a question; 3 hands; called on S4." On the right, write your interpretation and questions: "Wait time short? Same students answer each time?"
Timestamp as you go. Note the time every few minutes, or whenever the activity changes. Patterns show up when you look at the timing later, like how long transitions take.
Sketch the room. A quick seating chart with the teacher's movement drawn as a line tells you a lot about who gets attention.
Use tallies for a focus question. If your assignment asks about questioning or participation, make a small tally chart: questions asked, students called on, types of questions.
Protect students' privacy. Never write full names. Use codes like S1, S2 or roles like "student near the window." Don't note anything about grades, disabilities, behavior plans or family situations beyond what your assignment needs, and follow your placement school's rules exactly.
Don't photograph or record students unless the school has explicitly given permission. Schools usually have strict rules about images and recordings of children, and the rules for your college lectures don't apply in a K-12 classroom. Ask your mentor teacher and your program.
Tip: end every observation with three lines: one thing to try in your own teaching, one question to ask your mentor, and one thing that surprised you.
Drafting lesson plans
Your program will probably require its own lesson plan format, and you should use it for anything you submit. Most formats share the same core parts:
- A learning objective that says what students will be able to do, in a way you can check.
- Standards the lesson addresses.
- Materials you need.
- An opening that gets students thinking.
- Instruction, guided practice and independent practice, with rough timings.
- Assessment: how you'll know who learned it.
- Differentiation: how you'll support students who need more help or more challenge.
- Closure.
Draft by hand first. Sketching the flow of a lesson, with arrows, timings and a quick drawing of how desks will be arranged, is faster on paper than in a form. Once the plan makes sense, type it into your program's template.
After you teach it, go back to the draft and write what actually happened in the margin, in a different color. That annotated draft is worth more than the clean copy.
Meetings and reflection
Mentor teacher meetings move fast, and the feedback is easy to forget. Write the date, the main points and the next steps, with who will do each one. Reflection journals, which many programs require, are easier if you write a short entry the same day as your placement, while details are fresh.
Education notes in Scribba
Pages that match the work. Paper type changes per page from the page sidebar. Meeting Notes paper has DATE, TIME, LOCATION, ATTENDEES, a numbered AGENDA, NOTES and ACTION ITEMS with an OWNER column, which suits mentor meetings. See meeting notes template on iPad. Journal paper, with a DATE line and wide-spaced rules, works for reflections. Weekly Planner paper (WEEK OF, a box for each day) can map out a placement week.
Your own lesson plan skeleton. There isn't a lesson plan template, so make one: write your program's headings on a blank or ruled page once, then duplicate the page from the page sidebar each time you start a new plan. Bookmark finished plans so the notebook's table of contents becomes a list of every lesson you've written.
Observation notes. Snap a straight line down the middle of the page by holding the Pencil still at the end of a stroke, for the two-column layout. Lock the placement notebook with Face ID, Touch ID or a passcode. See lock notebooks with Face ID.
Portfolios. Export a notebook or selected pages as PDF when you need to submit observations or annotated plans. More in export iPad notes as PDF.
Your own lectures. In your college classes, if the professor allows it, you can record and later tap your notes to hear that moment. That's for your university courses, not your placement classroom.
Frequently asked questions
Can I record in my student teaching classroom?
Only with explicit permission from the school and your program. Rules about recording children are usually strict, so ask your mentor teacher first.
Should I type or handwrite lesson plans?
Many students sketch the plan by hand and type the final version into their program's required template.
How should I refer to students in observation notes?
Use codes or roles, never names, and leave out sensitive details your assignment doesn't need.