Organizational Skills and Graphic Organizers
I like using graphic organizers with my students. When I use any copied worksheet type of activity, it is usually a graphic organizer.
A whole lot of learning theory is being the intentional use of the graphic organizers. First, graphic organizers help to strengthen the executive function of organization. Second, graphic organizers help to build structural thinking in categories and details. Third, graphic organizers help to keep students more actively engaged in higher level thinking.
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Organization is an executive function skill I want to strengthen in my students.
As a learning specialist, I am intensely aware of the lack of organizational skills my students with special needs almost always have. They have trouble organizing their stuff, their time, and their thoughts.
Kids can be messy and disorganized in more ways than just their stuff.
Your kids may leave their stuff everywhere. Even if there is a system. Maybe your kids make trails of backpack, jacket, shoes, papers, and toys wherever they go. You can see where they’ve gone through the house by the trail. And you are constantly picking up after them!
They have trouble managing their time. They can’t remember the days of the week or the months of the year. They have difficulty with transitions. They get absorbed in an activity and lose track of time. If your kids are teens, they are almost always late. Or they are not even aware of the importance of watching the time!
If a learner has trouble with stuff and time, they typically have difficulty organizing thoughts also. That can result in memory retrieval because ideas and important facts are filed in the fewer places in the brain. Finding the main idea, the big point, or summarizing can be very difficult. That can translate into every subject area but especially in written expression. If students can’t find the main idea of a paragraph or passage, they also can’t write a topic sentence or develop a thesis.
So what to do? We teach. Some students may require more intense teaching through cognitive training. And yes, cognitive training is just another form of teaching. All students who struggle with organization require explicit instruction.
What is Explicit Instruction?
Explicit instruction just means to overtly explain what seems intuitive to us. It’s kind of like explaining a joke. Most people get jokes and laugh. Some of us (me included) just don’t always get the point on our own. So someone explains it, which might take the fun away for the explainer, but the person getting the explanation finally gets the joke. You may think something is obvious to the learner, but it’s not. So when you explain the concept explicitly and allow the learner to practice, the skill can grow.
As the brain skills get stronger, we want to help kids become better thinkers. I like to tell my students that the smartest people think in categories and details.
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Thinking in categories builds structural thinking.
That’s where graphic organizers come in. Graphic organizers help our unique learners to visually see the structure of the task we are asking them to do. We don’t need to dumb it down into a lower-level thinking skill or back to drill practice. We need to scaffold the task so they can show what they know.
A graphic organizer demonstrates the structure.
I have created many graphic organizers for my students over the years. I’ve used graphic organizers for reading comprehension, writing sentences, writing paragraphs, reading large numbers, long multiplication, and changing unlike denominators for fractions. I am updating my graphic organizers for YOU! One is at the bottom of this email newsletter! You can find others in my TPT store – some are FREE!
Sometimes the graphic organizer looks like boxes so the learner can “file” component parts of an overall concept. Other times a graphic organizer looks like a checklist or a flow chart to follow a process. Still other graphic organizers incorporate shapes to create associative hooks for memory.
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Students do more active learning.
Graphic organizers enable unique learners to be successful. In public school terms, it enables students to access the general education curriculum. As homeschoolers, we just want our kids to flourish in learning and be able to have the skills needed to enter college or the work force!
A common approach in homeschooling is the Charlotte Mason approach. At the basic level, homeschoolers know that Charlotte Mason integrated “narration” into the learning process. Narration takes place as oral language when kids are younger and written essays when they are older. The goal of narration is to help learners practice actively engage in organization of information. As a young child retells a story, the presence of literary elements (characters, setting, problem, plot development) is an indicator of comprehension and whether the child can organize the story components.
When kids struggle to organize information, they are often given more worksheet practice to fill in the blanks. Active learning is lost. Problem solving is lost. The attempt to organize information is lost.
Graphic organizers give students the structure they need to be actively engaged in problem solving.
Think of putting together a bookcase by yourself or from directions. You could try to figure out on your own which boards are connected. Directions for furniture assembly are often pictures with letters assigned to the boards and numbers assigned to the screws. Assembly is easy because the structural organization is there. You still have to actively put the bookcase together.
Teacher, Mom, Supervisor, you still need to check up on the student’s work. Just providing a tool doesn’t mean the child knows how to use the tool or uses the tool properly. Use a graphic organizer multiple times.
The Montessori concept of a lesson is 3-fold: “I’ll show you. Let’s do it together. Now you try.”
Use that principle with graphic organizers.
The first time, demonstrate how to use the graphic organizer. I like to laminate my graphic organizers so that when I demonstrate how to use them, I can use dry erase markers and swipe away the work when we’re done.
Next, do the task together. Have the student dictate information and correct as you go. For example, if you are using a graphic organizer for literary elements and the middle school student identifies the antagonist as the main character (protagonist), ask why. Maybe the student has identified something that is really abstract thinking and lifts the apparent antagonist to a different status. Or maybe the student is confused and sees all of the characters as equivalent in importance in the story. You may end up staying in the second “lesson” of doing a graphic organizer together until the student is more consistent and confident.
Finally, the lesson can move to independent work. Continue to use the same graphic organizer until a specific skill is mastered. Consistency builds good habits and more confidence. Go beyond when you think a child has something mastered. That’s when a kid starts to choose to use the tool that works or abandons a tool because it’s not needed as scaffolded support any longer.
Graphic Organizers Help Students in Many Ways!
With graphic organizers, we can give unique learners the same tasks as any other student. But with a visual organizing strategy, unique learners can better manage their materials, time, and thoughts in ways that boost memory, demonstrate their higher level thinking skills, and help them be more engaged!
