This week we looked at the instructional tool advanced organizers. Advance organizers are a tool to be used at the beginning of a lesson or unit to get students warmed up and thinking about the lesson to come.
When I think about all the tools I’ve learned about over the past year, they sometimes blur together. Advance organizers, graphic organizers, non-linguistic representations, and others are all tools which can be mixed and matched to fit your needs. A non-linguistic representation can serve as an advance organizer. A graphic organizer can serve as either an advance organizer or a non-linguistic representation. I think we are sometimes lead to believe each of these is an individual tool each separate.
I tried to use a form of advance organizer a few times during my internship. One was during the introduction of a unit of rocks. I started by trying to think up all the ways in which rocks could be used or have meaning to humans and found pictures of them. I then started the class asking the students if they thought about all the rocks they pass everyday and how rocks might be used or important in the lives of humans. We discussed each idea as it came up and I pulled up a picture if I had thought about it. If the students hadn’t thought about it, during the discussion I brought rocks as significant places or objects, such as Uluru in Austrailia. I finished the lesson telling about the stone statues of Easter Island and how the statues are believed to have been a factor in the fall of the civilization there. This story seemed to catch their attention and we had some good discussion about the story. I thought this lesson went well and even though it may have been a little more abstract than it should have been I think the students learned some fun facts and may have peaked their interest in rocks a little more.
