When students do expository or argumentative writing, consider having them add a graphic organizer to their finished product to illustrate a concept in their piece. The bulk of student writing time should be spent actually drafting their piece. A warning: Do not treat the organizers as the writing piece have students just jot notes down in these, rather than complete sentences. If you’ve never tried it, it’s worth adding this into your writing process, especially if you teach a content area where writing isn’t a regular part of student work. Having students use graphic organizers to plan and structure their ideas before putting them into a draft is a common practice in English language arts classes. If students ever give their own presentations, have them try using graphic organizers to present their information. This will instantly give students a way to visualize how the concepts are related to each other. Instead of giving a lecture with a standard PowerPoint or an outline, present your content in a graphic organizer. (See the Tips section below for more information on this.) 2. If you are already familiar with the content and how it’s structured, you might choose or design an organizer ahead of time for students, which research says can be more effective and efficient than having students create their own. Have students use graphic organizers to take notes on their reading, when doing research, while watching a film, or while listening to a podcast. In fact, much of the research on graphic organizers has focused on how powerfully they can impact the learning of students with learning disabilities and special needs (Dexter, Park, & Hughes, 2011 Douglas, Ayres, Langone, & Bramlett, 2011).ġ0 Uses for Graphic Organizers 1. Presenting information in both text and graphic formats is one of the most basic ways to make a lesson accessible to more students-the basis of Universal Design for Learning-and graphic organizers definitely fit the bill there. Graphic organizers also help us meet the needs of all learners. Decades of research with various age groups and in different content areas has shown that in general, when graphic organizers are incorporated into instruction, student learning improves (Hall & Strangman, 2002). While some approaches like doodling and the mind’s eye strategy apply this theory by having learners create physical and mental pictures of concepts, a graphic organizer keeps the words, but arranges them on a page visually so we better understand how concepts are related. When we’re learning new words or concepts, it’s helpful to try to form mental images for those ideas to reinforce their meanings. When we see the word “book,” we picture a book in our minds, because we’ve had plenty of real-life experiences with books. According to Allan Paivio’s theory of dual coding, humans process information in both visual and verbal form.
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