Week 3 Watching Teaching in Action

Many times learners are unsure of how to organize their thoughts as well as how to take notes as they are reading a text. Using the pre-made graphic organizers would allow learners to compartmentalize their ideas based upon how the book is organized. They would be able to “see” where to place notes from the introduction as well as alternate story lines as they progress through the book. They may take to it like ducks to water as in the past when we have studied dialogue they immediately used boxes as in a comic strip to show the dialogue taking place.

As an adult educator I would be curious as to how my learners would react to the organizers. I can see how younger learners would easily roll into the comic strip idea, however I am curious as to how older adults would accept this idea.

Hello, all. I was just checking out the printable cartoons on Earth Day and it occurred to me that one use for these particular cartoons would be for a practice of conditionals.  For example, see the printable cartoon that asks "What would you do if dinosaurs roamed the earth today?" "How would your life be different?"  Another use could be teaching affixes (recycle; recycling). It is a worthwhile topic, I think, and students could go online to find out their city's regulations on recycling.  These activities relate to standards on language, in particular, those requiring students to participate in speaking, listening and reading and writing activities in which they cite evidence from multiple sources, demonstrate knowledge of conventions used in writing and speaking, , and so on. My question is this: In looking over the cartoons,  there were few if any adults shown.  Most, if not all, drawings appeared to be of children. Is this an issue, do you think? Would it be more useful to depict adults in the cartoons? What would you do in  your classroom?   RESPONSE: As an adult educator I find that materials that have drawings of children are okay. As most of our adults have children they can easily relate to drawings with children in them. I find that as long as long as we respect our adults as adults, we can use a range of materials with them. At times when I find a really good book but it looks child like I explain, "this book looks child like, but it has strategies that we need to address and the book does it better than any other I have found!" This tells them, "I know you are not a child." which is VERY important to our adults. As a side bar to the dinosaur cartoon; we used Jurassic Park as a reading/ science lesson and had rave reviews! It allowed us to use a "younger genre" movie clip to compare and contrast written word( from the book) versus media visualization as well as a discussion of evolution! We had a great time and  it brought a lot of interest into science!

Hi,

Meryl, thank you for including this resource. Helping students understand the organization of information in a text is an effective, engaging instructional approach. I really liked how the instructor integrated the comic strip graphic format into the class activities with the non-fiction text.

While the video mentions the comic strip approach, an extensive amount of research exists around graphic organizers (GO). Douglas Dexter and Charles Hughes  completed a meta-analysis of GO and students with learning disabilities.  Their review included 16 articles and demonstrated significant benefits to learners: increased vocabulary knowledge, comprehension and inferential knowledge. No negative effects were noted either.

Unlike the video, the research with strong results included one to two sessions specifically focused on the instructor teaching how to use the GO and one to two sessions of prompted practice. As we consider our adult learners, our experience is that providing explicit, direct instruction in using the device is important for the instructors and the learners.

In our research, we found that spending time with the instructors in the technical trade classes was very important to their developing proficiency in effective use. We had to provide multiple examples (e.g., develop unit organizers from the textbook) rather than just telling them the parts of the GO and expecting them to be effective.

One of the bottom line take away messages was that after the students learned to construct the GO, they could continue to use them for taking notes and found them very helpful for preparing for their in-class tests (formative tests) and review for their trade certification exams. My sense is too that the GO helped the teacher develop a better organization of the textbook so that their teaching improved. We saw several teachers continue to use the GO after the study ended, which was a wonderful validation.

By the way, the comic book template would be best be considered an example of a cognitive map GO. 

In Dexter and Hughes review, the largest beneficial effect was found in science and least effect (though still significant) in mathematics. They also pointed out that different GO types have different value in the instructional sequence. For example, the more instructionally intensive type of GOs (e.g., semantic mapping and semantic feature analysis) are better for immediate recall and more computationally efficient GOs (e.g., visual display and syntactic/semantic feature analysis) are better for maintenance and transfer of learning. 

The citation for Dexter and Hughes journal article is: Dexter, D.D, & Hughes, C.A. (2011) Graphic organizers and students with learning disabilities: a meta-analysis. Learning Disability Quarterly, Vol 34, Nos 11, pages 51-72.

Regards,

Daryl

Moderator, Reading and writing community