Visualizations and Graphic Organizers

Now into the 2nd quarter, you might be looking for a new way for students to take notes, process information, and communicate their own understanding and analysis of your teaching and their learning.

Successful students may be ready for something other than Cornell/STAR notes and struggling students may need a different way to record and construct meaning from new information.

Provide a graphic organizer that perfectly portrays the process exemplified by your studetns' learning or, depending on the skill of your students or the sophistication of the material, allow students to decide on their own how to best graphically organize their thinking and learning.  Both options give students a strong understanding of both the new concept and their own metacognition.

Visualizations and graphic organizers are research proven methods of learning. For me, requiring a concept map added what was missing in my teaching and some of my students’ learning in one of my less engaging units.

A periodic table for Chemistry Teachers and their colleagues across the disciplines

Ralph Lengler and Martin J. Eppler  created a resource Periodic Table of Visualizations that provides various visuals and graphic organizers students can use.  Examples of Data, Information, Concept, Strategy, Metaphor, and Compound visualizatons are provided. Because the methods are categorized, metacognitive language, awareness, and cognition increases. The examples are also categorized by indicating process or structure outlines along with detail and/or overview visualizations. Indicators of convergent or divergent thinking are also noted. 

For more on the very thoughtful way they organized these structures, review their publication Towards a Periodic Table of Visualizations . Though Lengler and Eppler work in the Institute of Corporate Communication, the graphic organizers are useful for teaching and learning with our students.

Employing the best graphic organizers support our students’ growing critical thinking skills, deep understanding of our content, and supports their mastery of the following standards and practices:

ISTE Standards for students:

1. Creativity and innovation:  b. Create original works as a means of personal or group expression c. Use models and simulations to explore complex systems and issues
2. Communication and collaboration:  b. Communicate information and ideas effectively to multiple audiences using a variety of media and formats

CCSS.MATH.PRACTICE.MP4 Model with mathematics.

Mathematically proficient students  are able to identify important quantities in a practical situation and map their relationships using such tools as diagrams, two-way tables, graphs, flowcharts and formulas.

CCSS.ELA-Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, & Technical Subjects  2: Write informative/explanatory texts, including the narration of historical events, scientific procedures/ experiments, or technical processes.

2A grades 9-10: Introduce a topic and organize ideas, concepts, and information to make important connections and distinctions; include formatting (e.g., headings), graphics (e.g., figures, tables), and multimedia when useful to aiding comprehension.

2A grades 11-12: Introduce a topic and organize complex ideas, concepts, and information so that each new element builds on that which precedes it to create a unified whole; include formatting (e.g., headings), graphics (e.g., figures, tables), and multimedia when useful to aiding comprehension.

Building blocks for Background knowledge: Need to know nouns

Vocabulary as a vehicle to strengthen and liberate working memory

M. Sprenger explains “Not only does background knowledge grow in the brains of our students, through their experiences, but the vocabulary words that are stored as a result of such experiences provide avenues to comprehend curriculum from the text, as well as lecture and discussion ( page 6, 2013)

Last week I listed the verbs that educational researchers indicate are critical for mastering the Common Core state standards as well as becoming college and career ready.  Below you can find a list of the nouns needed for the same goals.

Why nouns now?

Yes, the list below indicates that  students in our high school district should already be fluent in these nouns, but depending on their prior experiences, one of our students may still believe that an argument is a fight and forget that it also requires both writing a thesis and articulating critical thinking ( through critical thinking would be powerful in a fight).  And, given this variety of prior experiences,  we may work with a student who has not yet discovered that actual alliteration can absolutely be an advantageous, smart and silly way to learn and communicate.

So often we have students, especially those who are pushing themselves to take a first advanced class, who will quietly share “I  can’t talk as smart as the other students”.  With purposeful and targeted academic vocabulary instruction, we can bridge that opportunity gap and support our students’ courage and growth mindset.

Nouns in the Common Core

Nouns in the order they appear in the Common Core State Standards ( Springer, page 121) with some context:

1st grade: connections, details

2nd grade alliteration (see above)

3rd grade: central/main idea, illustration, point of view, stanza, theme

Identifying theme is asking students to clarify the message. The theme connects to and is more than the main idea.  The theme indicates a universal message that can clarify connections and requires abstract and thus higher order thinking.
4th grade: conclusion, evidence, figurative language, metaphor, simile, structure

The Common Core State Standards often ask for the teaching of conclusions requiring students to infer and the using  specific textual evidence.

Being aware and using Illustrations and structure will not only help students understand and remember information,  both make it easier for students to understand and remember concepts, thus liberating  working memory and giving more space for new concepts. Familiarity with structure will help students use that new prior knowledge when they tackle more sophisticated text.
Identifying and creating metaphors and similes are a proven best practice as they require the higher ordered thinking of comparing and contrasting.
5th grade: interaction, argument

One of the 5 shifts required by the CCSS is to teach argument instead of persuasion. Argument uses logic and evidence.

6th grade: connotative language, mood, tone

Understanding connotative and figurative language helps students identify tone. The most common figurative language is simile and metaphor (145).

7th grade: analogy

Analogies, though gone from the SAT, can be a useful learning stretch. Marzano lists identifying similarities and differences as one of the best ways to improve student achievement and playing with analogies provides practice in that skill. The logic required in identifying analogies is another crucial college and career readiness skill.  

8th rhetoric It’s an election year and we are working to prepare participants in our democratic society.
Enough rhetoric, next week: pronouns and identify safety.

The Vocabulary Deficit Or Why add another thing to my to-do list?

With new data just released from SBAC scores and headlines like  Income inequality in Bay Area exceeds national levels from SF Gate on July 30, 2015, we have a specific call to action for teaching and learning in the MVLA district.

While we know diversity is a resource in our classrooms, being aware of the economic diversity in our classrooms adds another needed dimension to teaching and learning literacy.

The SF Gate article cites a 2013 study that found that the “Households with incomes among the top five percent of all households in the Bay Area “have average incomes of $489,000, according to the institute.That is 31.5 times the average income of the households at the bottom 20 percent of all Bay Area households, who earn about $15,500.”


Los Altos, Los Altos Hills, and Mountain View data

Data from the Santa Clara County Department of Public Health indicates that we 22% of our children ages 0-17 in Mountain View, 6% in Los Altos Hills, and 2% in Los Altos live in poverty.  Being an economically disadvantaged teen in our high schools is a very challenging minority status.

What does the data  mean for our students and our teaching?

Research continues to indicate that students from lower income households have learned “30 million less words by age three than other three year olds.” (Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley)

Without intervention, the gap grows. Those with lower reading scores get less exposure to and practice with challenging academic language, resulting in cumulative deficits (Louisa Moats, 2014) and a continued risk of an exponential falling behind.

And then reading becomes even more difficult for our students after grade 5: At grade 5 students are expected to learn at least 3,000 new word meanings per year from reading and direct instruction, just to keep up. Words are topic-specific and low-frequency. More background knowledge is required to make inferences and construct the meaning of the whole text.  Sentences are longer, more complex, and contain more ideas. Stamina and persistence are expected; meaning is constructed over longer segments of text.  (Moats, 2014)

The student who guesses, who has no strategies and confuses similar sounds, little automatic/previous exposure, or informed recognition, can’t decode, so if you don’t have the word recognition you get tired…  (Hart and Risley)

When They Get to MVLA

As we ask our students to do more reading, writing, and explaining, it is crucial for us to address any vocabulary deficits that prevent our students from working with challenging material.

Increased literacy improves our students’ ability to understand complex texts and explain their own thinking.  Greater literacy not only allows us to more authentically assess and address their mastery of content and skills, but it empowers our students for a lifetime of interacting with complex ideas.

Our call to action isn’t just to compensate for the inequities in knowledge stemming from inequities of wealth, but also to give our students the tools needed to succeed at the Common Core, understanding that because Common Core are potentially new standards, some of our current high school students have not had the benefit of a robust literacy education.

What We Can Do

Below are two groups of verbs for you to consider using with our students. These words can be added to your directions, prompts, and instruction.  Focusing on directive verbs helps students understand what type of thinking they should be doing.  When our students aren’t fluent with sophisticated or complex verbs, they might not understand what is expected of them.  For example, if asked to “discriminate” a student may think it is always an act they should avoid, rather than realize that they may be being asked to note differences.  Teaching and using sophisticated, complex, and varied prompts and directions can address inequities and empower all of our students.

 

The following are the “Critical Verbs,” (M. Springer) listed by grade level of expected mastery for CCSS. Thus, the expectation is that our juniors will be competent in all of the following skills.

Kindergarten: compare, contrast, describe, distinguish, identify , retell

1st grade: demonstrate, determine, draw, explain, locate, suggest, support

2nd grade: comprehend, develop

3rd grade: organize, refer

4th grade infer, integrate, interpret, paraphrase, summarize

5th grade: analyze

6th grade: articulate, cite, delineate, evaluate, trace

11th grade: synthesize.

The following is a list of verbs grouped by skills.  

As you assign a particular task or activity, you can add to the depth of their work while also expanding your students’ vocabulary and literacy. (Marzano, Kinsella, CCSS)

Add To	Create/Develop	Evaluate	Prove & Argue	Seek Information
deepen	accomplish	assess	assert	capture
incorporate	achieve		confirm	compile
integrate	build	Execute	qualify	elicit
	compose	advance	specify	encounter
Arrange	construct	employ	justify	evoke
sort	form	navigate	challenge
	generate		claim	Symbolize
Collaborate	initiate	Explain	promote	depict
engage	stimulate	articulate	verify	model
interact		narrate
	Decide	recount	Pull Apart	Think Metacognitively
Compare/Contrast	select	synthesize	decompose	appreciate
associate		clarify	decontextualize	attend
categorize	Define	convey	diagnose	monitor
differentiate	delineate		grapple	preserve
discriminate	discern	Pose	partition	reflect
link	establish	hypothesize	Probe
relate	exemplify			Transform
connect	recall	Infer	Reference	accentuate
distinguish	determine	deduce	acknowledge	conform
accomplish		infer	trace	convert
	Elaborate		cite	manipulate
	broaden	Measure		adapt
	derive	gauge	Big Picture	revise
	enhance	quantify	contextualize
	elaborate		orient
	expand	Problem Solve
		overcome
		surmount
		resolve