I’ve been poking around this book for a while now.  It’s full of lots of useful approaches for working with dependent and struggling readers (and ways to help teachers recognize the variety of ways that these students can slip through the cracks).  When Kids Can’t Read utilizes (among many other tools/ideas) many different kinds of graphic organizers to provide structure for these struggling readers, who may look at a text and not know how to begin making heads or tails of it.  And then this post at Tim Fredrick’s ELA Teaching Blog got me thinking.  He says (among other things):

1. They don’t push the students’ critical thinking.
2. They limit thoughts and responses.
3. They represent ideas in one graphical manner, which may not make sense to everyone.

…Just giving them blank graphic organizers to fill out isn’t going to teach them how to figure out what type of graphic organizer to use for a particular text.  We have to teach students about different graphic organizers, what kinds of texts to use them for, and how to draw them to suit the text.  This is a lot more than just filling out a chart.  It is recognizing text structures and forms.  It is evaluating the best way to represent information – which helps students process the information.

I visualize struggling readers approaching text as if it’s an unwieldy slug-monster.  Graphic organizers, in a sense, can help give a text (slug-monster) a bone structure. Which, yeah, immediately, sends off red flags in my brain.  If I, as the teacher, want to put a structure (back) into a text, who’s to say that I’m giving it the right one, or the one that makes the most sense to the student (see Fredrick’s caveats above)?  Of course, this kind of structuring is limiting.  It stomps on creativity and also on the possibility of promoting critical thinking.  But wait.I wholeheartedly agree with the three limits of graphic organizers that Fredrick points out in his post.  But I also see these three limits as reasons to use graphic organizers sparingly, and only as needed.  The idea of teaching students how to recognize the structure of information in a text and also how to best represent it graphically is intriguing, and sounds like a really great idea.  But the whole problem in the first place is that kids can’t make sense of the text that the graphic organizer is meant to help with.  I think that, at this point, it becomes a matter of priority.  In general, ready-made graphic organizers are a crutch, and they fill a very specific purpose, which is scaffolding a student to take a slug-monster of information fit it into a structure.  So that they first recognize that there is a structure.  Which, I believe, comes long before they can create this structure themselves.

As a kid in high school I made “graphic organizers” while I read my AP Biology text book.  It wasn’t something someone told me to do, and I wasn’t really aware that I was doing it, but I think that that ability to take in information, process it, and reorganize it into a structure that intuitively made sense to me, was a large part of why I was so successful at playing the school game.  But I recognize now, too, that that is a pretty advanced skill (which, I think, grew out of my embarrassing obsession with organizing and reorganizing my belongings and school supplies).  I don’t think that it’s a skill we can take for granted.

I digress, but what I think I’m trying to say is that the order for this whole graphic organizer process feels a little like potty training to me.  To use another odd and stretched metaphor.  First, you allow the use of pre-fab graphic organizers.  Yes, with one possible answer.  One correct way to fill in the blocks.  To sort of model the fact that text can fit into an organized structure.  And second, you begin to remove the training wheels only once the content is accessible (because that’s the whole point, isn’t it?).  You invite your kids to take this information that they now have one structured way of thinking about, and present it in a new way, themselves.  You model other ways of representing information (various ways, exciting ways… nongraphical, nonlinear ways).  I think that this second skill is much more difficult than it sounds. That being said, I also think it’s much more valuable.  Makes me think about that proverb: you give a man a fish, he’ll eat for a day.  You teach him to fish, he’ll eat for the rest of his life.  So, guys, let’s teach our kids to fish.  After they know what fish taste and look like.

And now I’m motivated to think about this whole thing more.  What are the cognitive processes involved in asking kids to organize and represent information another way?  And, developmentally, when can we expect kids to be able to do this?  As a high school teacher, I should mostly be OK.  In terms of good old Bloom, we’re definitely pushing level 2 (maybe 3 and 4).  So now I have some homework.