Wednesday, March 3, 2010
Advance Organizers
An advance organizer is a cognitive strategy proposed by Ausubel in his Subsumption Theory, which allows the learner to recall and transfer prior knowledge to the new information being presented. This theory is based on the idea that learning is facilitated, if the learner can find meaning in the new information. If a connection can be made between the new information and previous knowledge, the learning experience will become more meaningful to the learner. Therefore, the new information will be learned. The advance organizer is not a strategy used by the learner, but rather an instructional strategy used by the teacher. In essence, the advance organizer is a brief, general speech, written outline or graphic representation prepared by the teacher, before presenting the new material, to introduce the lesson. In designing the advance organizer recall of previous knowledge relevant to the new knowledge is important. It should provide a bridge that links the known to the unknown, by including an abstract outline of the new information and a restatement of old knowledge. Theoretically, this will encourage transfer and application of old knowledge, to make the new knowledge more meaningful to the learner. Given what you know about the importance of using advance organizers create one that you can use this week in one of your classes. Post your advance organizer on your own blog and be prepared to discuss this in class when we meet again. Also, add one or more of the links which are listed under "Advance Organizers" just to the right of this note to your own delicious account or your blog, whichever you use more often.
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Since I am one of the last to post a lot, I thought I would be one of the first to do this. My "theme" for my blog is autism spectrum disorders, so I try to keep in mind what I could use to apply what we are talking about to this type of population (and other types of different needs students) (since I don't have my own class). Children with ASD tend to not always pick up on emotions very well. They also tend to be more visual then auditory in learning. So, I found some attribute webs (advanced organizers) on line. These could be used to teach various emotions to children by breaking down a character (or person) (in the middle of the page inside of a rectangle), the top we web squares say the words "How he looks" "His behavior" "His thoughts" & the bottom three "His statements, "His fears", "Others' actions toward him". I think that students could be taught to use this type of organizer to identify a charcter in a video or picture book, and label emotions/predictions by how the charcter looks (facial expressions), behaviors (what did or is the person in the video/book doing), thoughts (what could he/she be thinking about), what did he/she say (use the words to help us predict how he feels. I am not sure how the other squares could be used, so maybe just a four box web. Students could also use these attribute webs to help them apply these same characteristics when they are learning about characters in stories later on. It would also help older students expand not only emotions, but how to adjust their behaviors to various social situations that they encounter.
ReplyDeleteThe graphic organizer that I plan to use next week in my class is called a word map, which can be found under "Holt Interactive Graphic Organizers" website. I am going to use it with our weekly vocabulary words. Students will choose one of the vocabulary words and write it in the center. Then they will write the definition in the upper circle, a synonym and an antonym in the two side circles, and a picture or sentence in the bottom cirle.
ReplyDeleteThe graphic organizer I plan to use this week is called Story Map 2, which can be found under the "Graphic Organizer" link. I am going to use it after we read a little of our book James and the Giant Peach. We are nearly finished so this will be a good check of recall and understanding. I will probably have them work with partners and then share with the class how they organized the information they have gathered from listening to the story.
ReplyDeleteThe graphic organizer that I used in class was the sequence chart from the holt link. Together as a class we read the story for the week and then I got them started on filling in the organizer together. I had already filled in the first circle for them and then we did the next two together. They used it to fill in the major events for certain page numbers that I had given them for each circle. It worked great and helped them pull the important part of the story out.
ReplyDeleteI teach social studies to both classes of third grade. I tried to use the process and cyle chart found on the Holt site. I used it basically as a time line form to keep myself focused on the order of important events leading up to the arrival of the railroad in the mountain communities (Glenwood Spring, Colorado lesson... for all those 3rd grade ss teachers out there!) It worked well to help me stay focused on what the order was... so that I could easily guide the students during the assignment of cutting and pasting the time line in order while using their books for info. It also helped in the quick assessment of their understanding.
ReplyDeleteThe graphic organizer that I used in my classroom was the sequence chart, which can be found under "Holt Interactive Graphic Organizers" website. In 2nd grade we work on sequencing and retelling a story a lot so I thought this would be great. They read the story from their reading books. After that I used the sequence chart as a guide while teaching the main events in the correct order. The students followed along in their books while we did this.
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