USING ADVANCED ORGANIZERS

 By: Dr. Armãndo R. Tolliver | EDUCATOR | April 4, 2017

            Do you recall learning about cellular energy when you were in school? The science teacher presented all this in-depth information about photosynthesis and cellular respiration. I mean, you are sitting there and the teacher is speaking what seems to be a foreign language, “autotrophs, heterotrophs, reactants, products, thylakoid, chloroplast, mitochondria, nucleus, organelles, plastids, bioenergetics, adenosine triphosphate (ATP), cellular respiration, photosynthesis, autotroph, heterotroph, pigment, chlorophyll, light dependent, light independent, Calvin Cycle, NADP, calorie, Calorie, glycolysis, fermentation, electron transport chain, Krebs cycle, anaerobic, aerobic, glucose, glycogen, starch, pyruvic acid, lactic acid, NAD & FAD, acetyl-coA, citric acid, and creatine.” You get the point right? It is like this information overload, only to finish hearing about the information and still not understand the fundamental concept that photosynthesis and respiration are related, mutually connected physiological functions. It makes sense why it was so difficult. One reason was information overload and the other was material exchange could not keep up making the information overwhelming or impossible to process. Without the advantage of any setup, without any forecasting of content or accessing of prior knowledge, discerning what is important and learning it to the point of recall is rather challenging. This scenario highlights the importance of advance organizers.

Advance organizers are statements, activities, graphic organizers, or other tool that is used to introduce the lesson topic and help students anticipate, organize and illustrate the relationship between what the students are about to learn and the relevant information they have already learned. They are used in a variety of ways  (e.g. expository, narrative, skimming, graphic) during instruction in order to bring ease to students’ ability to make connections from one concept to the next, acting as a conceptual bridge and indicate to students what information from a lesson will be important.

QUESTIONS TO PROMOTE THINKING

 By: Dr. Armãndo R. Tolliver | EDUCATOR | March 30, 2017

            Effective questions keep students thinking and involved in the learning process (Varlas, 2002; Marzano, Pickering, & Pollock, 2006). Questions can range from simple knowledge to complex evaluation. Each level involves a higher level of thinking and thus a greater degree of student involvement with the content.  Inferential questions help students fill in gaps, connecting what they already know with what they are about to learn or learning. Analytic questions require students to really think about what they are about to learn or learning and start to analyze why it might be important or what it really means, which can be used to help stimulate class discussions and give greater meaning to information or ideas. By asking the right type of questions, teachers can help students progress from merely recalling facts and figures, to successfully applying and evaluating new information in a variety of situations.

            Let us take a look back at the scenario discussed in the post Learning and Behavior Cues. When it comes to classroom instruction, the first question for me is always the essential question, which guides the lesson and its contents whether from guiding a class discussion, a lecture, individual student reading assignments, viewing a video, labs, or assessments. Here is a sample of the matrix I created in order to transition from a unit on Basic Biological Principles to the next one on Cells. 

Notice how the essential question is connected to a big idea and performance indicator. Making the connection between the content and the essential question helps students learn how to study. With this lesson, I used had students organize information using Cornell notes, where I created an essential question to guide and frame the note-taking and connect the content knowledge communicated in the notes that helped students write their own questions for their notes, and frames the summary.