Making it easier to do hard work Katrina S. Kennett
Introduction As a classroom teacher, I feel an elegance when the ‘what’ we are doing is facilitated by the ‘how’ we are doing it. I realize this most clearly when we use graphic organizers in class. If you understand the internal grammar of the visual, you can see how it helps the internal grammar of the purpose. However, often people hand out graphic organizers as instrumental tools, as something for every student to do in a lockstep writing process. How can we be more intentional about helping students understand the ‘how’ of what they’re doing? This text I am writing for teachers who care about laying bare the ‘what’ they’re doing and the ‘how’ they’re doing it. I’m interested in combining three considerations: design structures, low-risk metacognitive writing, and social literacy practices.
These conversations lead directly to thinking about the social nature of online curation tools [section coming soon]. Paying attention to the design of familiar curation spaces makes it easy to think about the design of the digital tools that we use. Classroom discourse - Cazden - ‘what is a scaffold’ - in order to be a scaffold - cause someone to do something tat they couldn’t do before and you can be able to take it away
Some opening questions: - why does the task matter to the student? - are we teaching the tool, or the thinking behind the tool? - design is always in response to a situation - how are students designing their own graphic organizers for what situations? - who decides to use the tool?
We can be more intentional about the social nature of graphic organizers. Though they have the illusion of being an individual task, how can we have students collaboratively fill them out, talk over them, and curate from people outside of the classroom.
- what is the relationship between seeing and reasoning? - how does what we see help us reason intensely? - how do graphic organizers provide a relevant scope, not just a generalized tool? i
“the act of producing causes seeing and reasoning to have representations beyond themselves” (Tufte)
characteristic is intense tinkering, re-visioning - in revision, once again seeing, thinking “visual displays should assist reasoning about its content” produce, exceute, make something
bruner, wood, and ross - facet of reducing frustration
visual notetaking graphic organizers - degrees of freedom and marking critical features.
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Chapter 1
Graphic Organizers
- why not to photocopy organizers - classroom examples - thinking behind each example - why
Being Intentional about Design:
Venn Diagram Venn diagrams help us compare and contrast, but think more closely about scaling. ‘Scaling’ is If we compare a king and a peasant, the compare is going to be about their humanity. If we Design - usually more space in the how things are different than how they are the same How use as a way for me to realize something about the relationship between these two things. Scale matters - if comparing people to people, battle to battle, character to character, what is it that the middle elicits
How does this tool help me think about the same, and then about difference? how might it help me subvert ideas of diffrence and instead focus on how they are the same? 4
How could I have students fill out one side [this becomes like scattergories] why would they want information on both of them? [ image from xkcd]
Social - usually comes over
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Being Intentional About Design:
Thesis Vine My students often struggle with creating a thesis statement. One issues is that there’s so much they know about the text that i’s hard to boil down their argument into one statement. The Thesis Vine (or Path to Purpose) makes it easy to collect bits of information about a text (story, poem, primary source, etc.), and select among the curation options. I usually use three bullet points under each section to quickly capture who/what/where/when might be important. The three pointed triangle becomes a way to list three reasons why a text might be important. Collecting this information makes for a quick formative assessment, and offers multiple ways to read a text. Then, students choose one from each category and create a thesis statement off of it. This leads to Seven Steps to a Thesis. This organizer is super easy to draw, which makes it easy to put on the back of a reading (or the last page). You can also make multiple of them for different primary sources / scenes in a play / poems. You could use them as an intro activity, or as an exit slip 6
for the day. If you’ll use them consistently, they should be with complicated texts, ones with lots of moving parts. Multiple visions of Thesis Vine / Path to Purpose
Here are some examples:
An empty ‘Path to Purpose’
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Being Intentional About Design:
Quotation Wheel The Quotation Wheel makes it easy to collect quotations and then write about why you collected them. I like to have students fill out two ‘slices’ and then talk with others about what they put in their slices. Reading one book You could also have students choose four quotations and go collect the second layer from their classmates. You could do these for multiple chapters in a book, though I might set it up for chapters that are rich in the focused kind of quotation. I know that Chapter 3 in Brave New World is a difficult one because four different storylines start to spin together, so I might ask students to choose one from each storyline, and then we could cut the pie slices out and organize them by character. Notetaking during small-group discussions You could also have it be a scaffold for note-taking during an EdCafe, where students wrote down something that struck them, and then in the outer circle describe why and how it connected to their lives.
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Section 4
Relevance Rainbow / Relevance Rays It’s hard to take one quotation and explain why it matters. This graphic organizer came out of trying to help my students not only connect to a character, but also consider impact on the book and even to life.
Relevance Rainbow in Action
You could have students choose one quotation while reading a chapter / text and then have them fill it out together. You could have them ‘cut’ the rainbow in half, fill out half for themselves, and collect ideas from other people on the other rows. If they hate writing in a curve, which is understandable, I also have the alternative ‘Relevance Rays’ (see next page)
How could this quotation teach us something about life?
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Introduction
Designing
Why is it important to be thoughtful about graphic organizers? How does thinking about form ‘make visible’ our purpose?
Section 1
Contentions & Research Fusce fringilla, elit eu rhoncus vestibulum, orci quam ultricies lorem, a diam magna ut felis. Contentions
Teachers are architects of ecologies of writing and curation.
‘Low-risk’ metacognition helps students articulate and recognize their own learning.
Tools are designed.
Literacy tools scaffold our reading and writing practices.
Learning is a social process. Thus, being intentional about the social nature of our tools helps us learn from each other.
Students should create their own graphic or13
Taylor & Duke, 311 - “the most emphasis should be placed on strategies that support he planning and revising aspects of the writing process, which trouble struggling writers the most
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Š Katrina S. Kennett
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