This is my last summer with TEEM so I figure it's a good time to go over what I've learned with INBs (Interactive Notebooks) in the middle school math classroom.
Top thing: It's a struggle to get the feedback done. Research shows that feedback, not grades are best for student learning, but it's hard to fit feedback on notebooks in every day in the middle school. I know the elementary teachers have said it's a challenge as well. Even just stamping each notebook takes up a lot of time, sometimes I accidentally stamp when I don't mean to, etc. I do not like to collect them. I tried collecting them this past year and felt exhausted just looking at the stack of notebooks. I also don't like taking them during quizzes/tests because the point is to give them feedback before they're tested. Basically, I still haven't found the perfect solution for giving feedback in notebooks. One thing I am going to try this year is having them complete anything we're gluing into the notebooks and turn it in to me so I can check the paper before they glue it down. This does not solve giving feedback on anything they've written in the notebook itself, though.
Speaking of glue, I mentioned in a previous post what I'm trying this year for the glue dilemma. I'll post later about how all of that goes this year.
Every year I've done a table of contents, but I don't really keep up with it after about a month. The last two years I did have a poster on the wall that I updated, and I actually kept up with that, but my students didn't update theirs, or used half the page for one line despite my saying to keep the words in one box in the grid paper. This last year I tried out unit tabs and I really did enjoy that. One of my partner teachers mentioned that she's stopped using the ToC since she started using the unit tabs, and I think I will as well.
For the unit tabs, I liked having them as a third of the page for saving paper, but I feel like they are too small. And gluing the tab around the entire edge proved problematic because the glue would come loose and other pages would get stuck in there. So, this year I've printed each tab on a whole page, and will have the students glue the page to itself before gluing into the notebook, or the tabs themselves would fall off entirely. I went back and forth on adding vocabulary to the tabs, but couldn't find a format I liked so I left it mostly blank.
Numbering is another challenge for some reason. In TEEM, they number every right page, and call the left side OP and the right side IP. I quickly nixed IP because middle schoolers, but stuck with numbering only the right pages, because the left side is for their work/reflection and the right is for the work we do together. But, a lot of students really struggle with this. I'm not sure how to get them not to because they still do even with modeling it and me posting it on the board, etc.
I do make my students take them home, because managing 5 class sets of INBs is a bit much for me. Although I guess if I had them in class it would make it easier to give feedback more frequently. But then the students couldn't refer to the notes at home, if they were so inclined.
Lots of tough choices when it comes to INBs, that's for sure!
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