Dr. Michelle Parrinello-Cason has a Ph.D. in English with an emphasis on rhetoric and composition. She has more than a decade of teaching experience including six years as a college English professor. She has designed workshops and classes for elementary, middle, and high school students and is a homeschooling mom of two.

Her passions include pop culture, moral philosophy, essay writing, and reading skills. She designs classes that take a multi-disciplinary, integrated reading-writing approach to make sure learners have context and purpose for everything they create.

During her time as an English professor, Michelle specialized in teaching “developmental” writing, which means she was working with the students who had been deemed unprepared for college-level writing. In that work, she formed a teaching philosophy deeply centered on trust.

She believes that students learn best when they know that their instructor genuinely trusts them to do well. She works hard to avoid assignments and classroom dynamics that create antagonistic power structures. Instead, she wants learners to see her as a supportive guide who genuinely aims to help them reach their own goals.

Michelle is the founder of Dayla Learning, a place for “homeschooling the humanities with humanity,” and the co-founder of SEA Online Classes, a platform for hands-on, engaging online classes.

Note-taking is a foundational and interdisciplinary skill that will serve learners throughout their lives — but it can be really challenging to teach it effectively.

Note-taking is incredibly personal because it is essentially a snapshot of someone’s thinking made visible. What looks like a messy tangle of nonsense to one person can be a roadmap to understanding for another, and that leaves home educators in a tough spot when it comes to making sure our learners are grasping these skills in a way that works for them — even if it doesn’t always look the way we would do it ourselves.

In this presentation, Dr. Michelle Parrinello-Cason will explore a multiplicity of note-taking methods (including Cornell notes, sketch notes, annotation, and guided notes), explore how they apply to different types of texts (written, visual, audio, live, etc.), and give some tips on how to provide instruction and practice while giving your learners room to develop note-taking styles that work for them.