Article Graphic Organizer

[Alysha]

Forexample, if your desired learning objective is to have students explain the paradox that both an overly weak and an overly strong government can threaten individual liberty, the graphic organizer must be constructed to generate that level of thinking. The organizer should ensure that students move beyond the traditional listing of the weaknesses of the Articles of Confederation. Instead, the design should lead students to thoughtfully analyze how liberty was impacted under the British monarchy and the Articles of Confederation.

Students tend to view the completion of the graphic organizer as an end in itself rather than a means toward developing a more sophisticated insight. As such, be mindful to design the organizer with the end in mind: Communicate this goal to your learners, and ensure that the structure of the organizer requires students to make connections between content, achieve broader understandings, and perhaps even ask further questions.

A graphic organizer from the National Archives, for example, provides multiple prompts to help students analyze and close read historical documents, consider the author and historical context, and generate additional questions for continued research and reflection.

Over-scaffolding a graphic organizer means the higher-ordered skills of evaluation, determination, and judgment are used in the design stage by the teacher rather than in the instructional stage by the student.

In and out of school, scaffolds are meant to be removed; educators have to be willing to remove the training wheels or temporary platforms and let students become independent learners. Students will continue to encounter text and other content outside of school without the assistance of graphic organizers. Deliberate design and implementation of graphic organizers helps students develop autonomy and complex thinking capacity.

Help your students classify ideas and communicate more effectively with these free graphic organizer templates, available for download. They can be used to structure writing projects and help in problem solving, decision making, studying, planning research, and brainstorming.

When teachers begin to use graphic organizers they need to follow some simple steps to make sure ELLs gain knowledge from such a simple yet reliable tool (Merkley & Jefferies, 2001). For example as a teacher begins to present a new topic, such as the solar system, an organizer can assist introducing the new idea.

Teachers should also begin to verbalize the relationship between the ideas, and the information that will be taught. Students or adults can write/draw the information provided by other students using a K-W-L chart. Graphic organizers should be tailored to reinforce the relationships between concepts, reminding students that this is just a quick preview of the material that will be taught next.

Secondly, teachers need to provide the opportunity for students to participate in discussions. ELLs need to have numerous pauses to process language in order to participate. For instance, classroom activities can be tailored to let students create graphs such as a concept definition map. Students can create a list of familiar terms to these maps.

Graphic organizers facilitate ELLs' comprehension through visual illustrations of key terms, vocabulary, ideas, and the relationship among them. Improving student's reading comprehension can be challenging, but such progress is necessary when focusing on students who are learning English (Kim, Vaughn, Wanzek, & Wei, 2004).

Terri Sigueza expressed that ELLs are not necessarily struggling learners; they are learning a new language, and this is an enormous job on its own. As an advocate for ELL students her primary goal is to assure they are taught at their grade level using graphic organizers to meet their second language needs. Terri believes that graphic organizers hold they key to providing an opportunity for students to have access to content material with visual supports to fully reach their learning potential. Graphic organizers are easily accessible and adequate for all grade levels as they make learning meaningful, to all students.

Colorn Colorado is a national multimedia project that offers a wealth of bilingual, research-based information, activities, and advice for educators and families of English language learners (ELLs). Colorn Colorado is an educational service of WETA, the flagship public broadcasting station in the nation's capital, and receives major funding from our founding partner, the AFT, and the National Education Association. Copyright 2023 WETA Public Broadcasting.

Artwork by Caldecott Award-winning illustrator David Diaz and Pura Belpr Award-winning illustrator Rafael Lpez is used with permission. Homepage illustrations 2009 by Rafael Lpez originally appeared in "Book Fiesta" by Pat Mora and used with permission from HarperCollins.

Classroom teachers have used graphic organizers for years to help students gather, sift through, organize, and share information. Graphic organizers are appealing because they have a wide range use and adaptability for many different topics and subjects. General education teachers are familiar with common layouts for graphic organizers but may not be as familiar with how to adapt graphic organizers for students with varied learning needs. This TIPs sheet will expand on the traditional graphic organizer formats to show how they can be differentiated to meet the needs of students with the most significant cognitive disabilities through the use of Universal Design for Learning (UDL).

Although graphic organizers are commonly used by both general education teachers and special education teachers, teachers must consider what aspects of the graphic organizer might present barriers given the diversity of student characteristics in an inclusive classroom. For example, a student with cerebral palsy and a significant cognitive disability who has an orthotic brace on her arm will need adaptations to participate when students are writing into a graphic organizer. It is not sufficient to simply pair the student with a general education peer and have her watch the peer write in the graphic organizer, but rather materials will need to be adapted so the student can actively and independently manipulate word cards or objects to place them into a graphic organizer. This could still be done with a peer but the two would be working with the adapted materials together.

In a recent evidence-based practice review by Saunders et al. (2020), graphic organizers were found to be a promising practice for use with students with significant cognitive disabilities for academic instruction in inclusive settings. In this review, graphic organizers were used to teach reading comprehension of text in subject areas such as science (Jimenez et al., 2012) and social studies (Wood et al., 2015). Although positive effects were observed in these two studies for the use of graphic organizers during instruction for students with significant cognitive disabilities, additional research is needed to promote the use of graphic organizers to a research-based practice (i.e., more participants, research teams, and geographical regions). The implication for practitioners is that graphic organizers can help students with significant cognitive disabilities show higher level thinking skills that are aligned to the complexity of the grade level academic standards.

The table below describes common graphic organizers types, with the purpose and the essential feature of each. These essential features are non-negotiable. They must be present when using these graphic organizers. However, as adaptations are made to the graphic organizer, the purpose and essential feature must be kept intact. See the implementation section for how adaptations can be made to increase accessibility for students with significant cognitive disabilities.

Graphic organizers often incorporate higher level thought processes and can easily be modified for all learners using principles of UDL. Planning is key for successful implementation of differentiated graphic organizers because teachers must think ahead for all of their students to make sure they can access the content in a universal way by considering representation, expression, and engagement.

In this example the general education teacher asks students to explore properties and attributes of three-dimensional shapes by categorizing them as round, flat, or both. The majority of the class uses printed pictures of three-dimensional shapes by cutting and pasting them into their math journals where they have to draw their own Venn diagram. For students with significant cognitive disabilities, sorting tangible objects may be the best way to categorize each of the shapes.

In this example the general education teacher asks students to do a literary analysis of Moby Dick using a concept map. Some of the students in the classroom in the general education population begin to do so on a blank sheet of paper following the concept map format the teacher gives with each major headings filled out. Students with the most significant cognitive disabilities can utilize wiki sticks and preprinted cards to build a concept map.

Frayer Model. In this example the general education teacher asks students to review properties of lines and angles. The students in the classroom take the laminated cards the teacher made and copy them into their math notebooks. Students with the most significant cognitive disabilities are supported by having a more succinct definition and example graphic organizer, such as the triangle Frayer model below.

Here is an additional example video demonstration of differentiated fishbone graphic organizer: =SUqfwv3izO4 . This video clip shows how one teacher uses the Fishbone for first grade students by modifying it for all the students in the classroom. The adaptations include requiring less text in boxes instead of lines and opportunities to draw examples. Although a student with a significant cognitive disability is not included in this video example, the teacher could extend the modification given to the whole class by having preprinted images for placement in the modified fishbone graphic organizer.

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