Category Archives: Reference

Students with learning challenges almost invariably present to their teachers with executive skills issues. How might teachers in their content areas, while conveying the facts and skills on which students will be tested, build opportunities into our lessons for students to have useful experiences in learning to organize themselves? Since some colleagues and I conducted a professional inquiry into executive skills a few years back, the possibility of this kind of synthetic unit, using abstract content to teach concrete, real-world living skills has nagged at me. This Weekly Text is a prototype for the kind of learning activity I imagine. I use the word prototype deliberately. I have never used this lesson on the commonplace book in the classroom.

We expect students to manage larger and larger amounts information, but at least at the school in which I work, we offer no formal instruction or training to assist students in discovering and developing their own methods of organization. For students with even mild executive skills challenges, this is a devastating omission. But what would we use to teach organization, and how?

You can click through the link above to learn the basics on the commonplace book from Wikipedia’s good page (from which I was edified to learn that by “the seventeenth century, commonplacing had become a recognized practice that was formally taught to college students”). Fortunately, cloud computing gives students and teachers a variety of formats in which to start a digital-age commonplace book. Evernote and Dropbox are two of the better-known places to start and maintain a commonplace book.

I don’t know your school’s policy is on smartphones, but both Evernote and Dropbox offer apps on the major mobile applications platforms. I believe that the smartphone has potential to serve as a powerful learning adjunct for struggling learners. If your school permits the use of smartphones in the classroom (mine, for reasons that strike me as both foolish and ignorant, if that’s possible, doesn’t), then this lesson has room to help students learn to use their smartphones to aid them in their school work in both learning and organization.

So, the Commonplace Book Lesson Plan is a reading and writing lesson that introduces students to the concept of keeping information (at least at the beginning) in one place. I expect as I begin using this lesson, I’ll find ways it might be adjusted or adapted for greater sophistication and complexity, e.g. teaching students to create, use and organize useful filing systems, so that it can be used along a continuum that matches students’ abilities.

If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.