Copy of Your Progressive Summarization Notebook

2.3 Create Notes in Coda

How to Create Reading Notes Using Progressive Summarization Steps

We will use progressive summarization in class as the basic foundation for learning that takes place. I believe that the single-most important artifact that you will take with you from my class will be the notes that you take in your reading, research, and in our class discussions. These notes will be the “deliverable” that you will take with you throughout the rest of your time at Guilford College and beyond. I still reference my notes from graduate school, but rarely from undergrad because I had no system of organization and so it is almost impossible to find or use any of my learning from that time period. How we will use progressive summarization in this class will be a process for taking notes and a system for organizing them.

For me, note-taking is a learning “out-loud.” Progressive summarization is designing your notes, so that you can easily retrieve and/or share your learning quickly and easily. Therefore, treat this as your own personal knowledge bank and treasure it.

Think about what will be most helpful to you in 3 months, 12 months and 3 years from now. Keep your future self in mind. Often, your future self will be tired, crunched for time, under a deadline, scattered - make it easier on yourself later, do as much of the heavy lifting now while you’re already in the midst of it. What will you want to know most about what you read and learned?

Use the

10 big problems exercise to guide your reading⁠

. These problems/questions can be like coat-hangers for things you read - they give you a context to focus on.

The primary goals of this exercise are to:

a) make your notes thorough enough that you can understand them later (context),

b) summarize the most important parts of the reading / learning (comprehension),

c) design your notes in such a way that they are quickly “glanceable.”

Think in terms of layers and stages, each step you design your notes to become more and more useful to you. So that when you’re working on a paper and have 25 different sets of notes to work through, you make it easier on yourself to find the key components.

Read Part 1 and 2 of

A Progressive Summarization Guidebook - Tiago Forte⁠

for a more in-depth understanding of the process.

Object

Here is how to create your progressive summarization reading notes for class:

Here is the outline for the process:

1. The first time setting up you want to create a google drive folder with the name of your class “REL 110 - An Intro to Quakerism” or whatever class you’re taking.

Then create a google document per book, article, etc. Follow this basic format - Author, Last Name, Author First Name - Title. Like this “Muers, Rachel - Testimony.” At the top of the document write in the pertinent publishing information, link back to book on goodreads or amazon, or link to online article or whatever you like so you can find your source later.

2. Create your basic layout so you will be ready to take notes:

e.g. Create a Heading - Date - Chapter 1: “Bearing Witness” - Then take notes on that chapter.

3. Take notes on each reading session as you read. You are looking for key ideas, critical narratives, important people, themes that rise up, meta-analysis, counter-arguments, and new frameworks based on the course objectives. Anything that really resonates with you or greatly challenges your current thinking,

especially as it pertains to one of your 10 problems⁠

. These notes are for you and your future self. Be sure to give yourself enough context that you know why you thought this was noteworthy in the past.

4. After you finish reading the chapter and your notes for your reading for that day - go back through and bold the things that stand out to you now, after finishing the chapter. You can then go back and highlight things that you want to be able to find quickly. You are aiming for glanceability. Pull out the summaries, the brief ideas that you can scan quickly and get the basic gist of the note.

5. Share your google document on Canvas. Go to the course on Canvas and paste a public google document link on the Canvas for your classmates to read and markup (make sure when you share the document it is set so that anyone can comment).

Object

Then you can simply paste that link into Canvas or highlight the word(s) you want to have a hyperlink, click the chain icon and paste the link in the box that pops up for a "pretty link."

Extra Steps:

6. Read 3-5 classmates notes and highlight 3-5 key points/sections/sentences/words per person, using comments feature in google docs that resonate with you on your classmates’ notes. In the comment section, write a short comment about why you highlighted that portion, why it is important to you.

7. Go back and write a brief summary at the top of your notes for that book, considering the layers created through this process.

8. For those of you who do handwritten notes and "sketchnotes" (visual drawings). Please write out your notes in gdocs . If you have pictures and images you want to include in your gdoc - use the google drive app to "scan" your image, your phone's camera or an iOS app like scannable to take a picture of the images and upload them to your google document.

Some Goals for this project:

1. To practice different ways of note-taking that include "progressive summarization" so that you are able to quickly gather key points from your reading.

2. To get immediate feedback from your classmates.

3. Give you an artifact you can take with you for other classes at Guilford.

4. To help you think through what you resonate with, what you connect to in terms of questions, and what is relevant to your own thinking and development as a scholar.

Next: 👉
`2.4 Quiz`⁠

Want to print your doc?
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Try clicking the ⋯ next to your doc name or using a keyboard shortcut (

CtrlP

) instead.

2.3 Create Notes in Coda

Next: 👉 2.4 Quiz⁠

Next: 👉
`2.4 Quiz`⁠