My daughter is in grade 6 this year. She stumped me yesterday when she asked “what is the most intimidating thing in the world?” I didn’t have an immediate answer. It occurred to me that a lot of people might say “public speaking”, but she has “motivational speaker” near the top of her current future job list, so clearly that wasn’t going to be it.
I shrugged.
“A Blank Piece of Paper” she announced (with all the exaggerated gravitas of someone who gets paid for public speaking engagements).
This, after having complained about writer’s block twice in the first weeks of school. The blank piece of paper stared back at her each time, when even with detailed instructions and some written prompts, she couldn’t begin for several minutes. She had hoped none of her new teachers would think she was daydreaming.
I wondered if some visual / graphic support would have been useful as scaffolding.
I like to have fun offering alternatives to the blank piece of paper for my students.
Several years ago, I stumbled upon the National Film Board’s Oscar winning documentary “If You Love This Planet” on YouTube. For those of you who are too young to have seen this (or whose minds have tucked this bit of horror way back on a dark shelf), this program featured Dr. Helen Caldicott, president of Physicians for Social Responsibility in the USA, making an impassioned plea for nuclear disarmament. The film cut between her speech and alarming images of mushroom clouds. My mother had sat me down at age 12 in front of our tv and we had watched this together. It was 1982.
I decided to show this film to my grade 12 history students when we were examining the nature of the arms race and the campaigns for nuclear disarmament in the early to mid 1980s. Before we watched, I gave them each the dreaded blank piece of paper and asked them to draw a stick figure head of me in 1982 – 12-year-old Paula Poikonen of Nanaimo – whose sense of safety and security in the world was about to be shattered.
Their task while watching was to add time stamped thought bubbles to stick-head Paula. What would she have been thinking as she watched, 2 minutes in? 4 minutes? I have never seen students writing in response to a video with as much passion before or after. I credit stick figure Paula as much as the source material.
We do all tend to use some forms of graphic organizers, but they tend to be the same ones over and over. Which ones are most popular?
Let me guess…
- Mind Map
2. T-Chart
3. Venn Diagram
Or for those of you who teach Social Studies, how about the famous Fishbone diagram for causation?
There is a reason that these ones are so well known and commonly used, as they offer simple and clear guidance for a) brainstorming b) pros and cons c) finding similarities and differences, and d) seeing that there are multiple causes of most anything.
In reviewing lesson planning for hundreds of future teachers each year, I have noticed a couple of trends when it comes to the use of visual / graphic organizers.
- They are not used often enough. Hey – I also tend to want to rebel against anything that could be labelled a “work sheet”, having grown up filling so many boring ones out. In wanting to embrace rich thinking and inquiry, a few steps are often missed in scaffolding student thinking. Instead there are blank spaces in time and empty google slides presentations and pieces of chart paper where thinking should magically appear.
2. We know and love the organizers that we know, so without thinking about them, we over apply them, using them for purposes they weren’t designed for. For example, consider the cool fishbone. If your learning intention is to have students understand there are several causes of X and what they entail, the fishbone will support that.
But what if the benchmark in the “cause & consequence” competency that is most relevant to your investigation is about long vs. short term causes. Or direct vs underlying. Or intended vs. unintended consequences. The fishbone won’t help with that.
This one from The Critical Thinking Consortium helps with direct and indirect consequences.
TC2 has a graphic organizer for SO MANY THINGS, recognizing the value of them as “tools for thought” in scaffolding student critical thinking and work with various disciplinary competencies. A membership is worthwhile to be able to access their collection alone, but that is only a fraction of their quality resources.
Here’s another example from their excellent – and free – new resource on historical commemorations, by James Miles (edited by Lindsay Gibson). Note all the ways that student thinking is guided in this activity sheet:
You can make your own! Or better yet, as your students to come up with an organizer that best supports the thinking required. They don’t have to be hard to make or look like you hired a graphic designer.
Example:
I used to ask my students to judge the relative significance of different causes of the First World War by drawing arrows of varying length and width coming into a central ball representing the war. Longer lines were for long term causes, like imperialism. The assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand had a short, stubby line, as a spark. How important was militarism in relation to nationalism? Students adjusted the thickness of their lines based on their take on the significance of each. These student-drawn small diagrams conveyed a lot of meaning and were easy to look at and compare, so they could walk around with their diagrams, entering discussions with other students.
Here’s what I mean. You would have them make it with markers rather than doing it yourself, but I just made one using Google Drawing. It took about 2 minutes to find the right shapes and to remember how to adjust line width:
Why do this?
Research in the use of authentic assessment (eg. Wiggins, 1989; Gulikers et al., 2004); Koh & Luke, 2007) emphasize the value of giving our students real-world, complex problems that have value outside of school and require knowledge manipulation. Koh, in her Oxford Research Encyclopedia discussion of the literature on authentic assessment emphasizes the need to use supportive task framing, such as content, procedural, and strategic scaffolding, to support the complex thinking students will need to do in these authentic tasks. That scaffolding can allow our students to begin to grapple with real-world, important issues, even the nature of this thinking is entirely new to them.
In my dissertation research, students in grades 6 and 7 generated ideas for the future of their city, then deliberated with their classmates on which ideas they should prioritize in submitting to a real-world public consultation process, via a meeting with a member of city council and a city planner. Their teachers and I used a variety of types of scaffolding, including graphic organizers.
Imagine if instead of the thought cloud, expression faces, and teeter-totter fulcrum, we’d handed them a sheet of blank paper to write on, or asked them to do the same thinking with a list of questions…
This was engaging, and gave students familiar visual prompts to support complex thinking about abstract, challenging issues.
Caution
My last word – for now – is a word of caution. These graphic organizers can be powerful in how they convey meaning. Before you use one, consider the potential unintended consequences if one shapes perception in a direction that you didn’t intend, or didn’t anticipate.
For example, I see ladders everywhere.
In real life, to safely use a ladder, one would start on the first rung and not skip any as you move your way up. If, as a teacher, you try to operationalize the development of a competency as a learning progression and then represent that with a ladder, this conveys that students need to be able to do everything on the bottom rung before beginning to move up the ladder. Is that the intention? I’m not sure.
This is likely an effective strategy for some things, but we should be careful not to over apply it. I have concerns about its application to social studies. If the grade 6 students that I researched had needed to demonstrate an accurate understanding of all relevant content information related to the task before they could be invited to think creatively and critically about the future of their city, I don’t think most of those kids would have ever managed to get there, even if they had important ideas that should be shared with the adults making decisions at City Hall. Authentic learning and authentic assessment call on us to invite all of our students into important and challenging thinking from the start, and to use content scaffolding to ensure they have access to information they will need, and procedural and strategic scaffolding (from these organizers and by other means) to prompt the type of thinking that is required for the context.
What’s a favourite visual / graphic organizer that you use? I’d love to see it.