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Opening the Door: Teaching Students to Use Visualization to Improve Comprehension

Literacy

"Thinking Maps, developed by Dr. David Hyerle, are visual teaching tools that foster and encourage lifelong learning. They are based on a simple yet profound insight: The one common instructional thread that binds together all teachers, from pre-kindergarten through postgraduate, is that they all teach the same thought processes."

Graphic organizers is our topic for Monday, March 12.

For my first journal, I read this article about multi-sensory language arts instruction.  It claims that if you can provide students with visual, auditory, and tactile-kinesthetic methods for learning, they are more likely to be successful.  One of the things that I agreed with most strongly that it seems many educators today shy away from is the idea that students should "practice to the point of automatization."  Automatic reading is not the key to comprehension but it is surely a necessary foundation for meaningful reading.  When I was a student, we practiced grammar and spelling until it was second-nature and generally my current abilities testify to that.  However, we have steered away from correctness in favor of sparing student egos.  I do not think that it has done them any good.  I wholeheartedly agree with this article that we MUST train our students to be good readers and writers. 

More emphasis is being placed on fluency. You can't understand what a text means if you can't figure out what it says. We don't want students to simple "bark at print" but there has to be a balance between fluency and comprehension.Was there anything in the article you would apply to your own teaching?

This article that I found I thought was very useful with new teachers developing classroom rules and procedures. Without the proper classroom routines and procedures in place a teachers classroom can be much different than they would want it to be. Noise levels, classroom wandering, and time being wasted can all occur. These things can be fixed but not by just announcing that no talking, staying in your seat, and staying on task are to be expected. These must be taught. The use of visual cues such as stop and start hand gestures as well as a gesture to say stop and start over if the procedure was not done correctly. By practicing the routine to mastery, students become aware that you are trying convey that this practice is important to their behavior. Establishing high standards is easier than having low standards. To show this, one must realize that reinforcement for bad behavior must come from the peer group. Research has reportedly shown that effective teachers show that they use the first few weeks of school teaching classroom rules. This is being proactive in your classroom.

Mrs. Meacham's website has a fantastic section on reader's workshop with units that focus on: front loading, fix-up strategies, connection, visualizing, questioning, determining importance, inferring, and synthesizing. Each unit has a link that takes you to the materials she uses while teaching each mini lesson. I especially like that you can print out all of the material and use it in your own classroom.

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Barrett-Mynes, J., Moran, M. J., & Tegano, D. (2010). Supporting struggling readers using interactive read-alouds and graphic organizers. Voices of Practitioners, 5(2), 1-12. This article discusses a four week study that was done in order to determine the effects that collaborative discussion and child-created graphic organizers used during read-alouds had on children's comprehension. Over the course of the study it was found that: 1. The children need less guidance from their teacher and became more collaborative with their peers in their discussions. 2. The use of graphic organizers became more child-created and required less teacher guidance. 3. Students in the study received higher scores on standardized tests. The article concludes that both collaborative discussions and child-created graphic organizers enable students to construct new knowledge and begin to organize their thinking in response to the comprehension of text. It was also found that by depending less on the the teacher for guidance, children were able to take more control and ownership of their learning. When I taught first and second grade, I loved using graphic organizers and read-alouds to help build reading and comprehension skills. I liked the fact that graphic organizers can be as creative and/or as structured as you would like. The most important factor for me is that graphic organizers can be used with any subject to help a child organizer their learning in a way that is helpful for them as learners.

I agree, it seems like the student's in the study would have had to have some prior experience with graphic organizers to be able to create their own. I loved using graphic organizers in my classroom, although with 1st and 2nd graders they were primarily teacher guided, I think that they were helpful for students to organizer their thoughts and be able to have a visual representation.

In first/second grade it is absolutely appropriate for the teacher to guide and scaffold the student use of graphic organizers.

This was my starting point for my second Journal article. I am a visual learner, and I like things organized, so I love graphic organizers. This article was a great starting point on different things that you can use to help students with their reading. I use them regularly for my social studies class as a way to encourage students to read the chapters and learn material. It is great at assisting them make connections. In history there are a lot of cause-effect relationships and graphic organizers help students "see" that very clearly.

I read this article with the idea that I would do a graphic organizer, except once I got started I realized that this held some important information, but I kept getting confused with the layout of the article - i.e. finding what were the big points and the sub points. So, I decided to use Livebinders.com to find a way to organize it, visually, for myself and anyone else who wanted to take a peek. This is the website for the original article: http://www.prel.org/products/re_/ES0419.htm This is the website for my livebinder: http://www.livebinders.com/play/play_or_edit?id=322029