If you looked around my classrooms, you would have spotted a huge red flag hanging on my walls. No, not a literal red flag! But a major clue that I was limiting my students’ thinking.
My walls were covered in students’ graphic organizers.
Graphic Organizers Are A Scaffold
But now I know that graphic organizers should not be a final product. They should not hang on walls with grades on them. They are stepping stones. They’re scaffolds. They help students reach a higher level of thinking. Graphic Organizers are not an end point, though.
That would be like writing the storyboards for a movie and then never filming it. Or writing out the chords for a song but never recording it. Or planning a vacation and then framing your plans rather than, you know, taking the darn vacation!!
Graphic Organizers Connect To Bloom’s Taxonomy
All graphic organizers act as a scaffold for a particular level of thinking on Bloom’s Taxonomy. When we use a graphic organizer, it should connect to that level of thinking.
- A plain old circle map supports a low-level brainstorm. “Think of all of the examples of X.” This is a good opener.
- A Venn Diagram helps students reach the Analyze level of thinking. It’s a scaffold for comparing and contrasting.
- A table also makes it easier to Analyze. It’s simpler to compare/contrast or categorize data when its laid out in organized columns.
- My school used [Thinking Maps]() and I loved employing the left side of a Multiflow Map for showing why a student was making a choice. The reasons are going into the decision. This lines up with Evaluation, where I want my class to explain their choice.
- The right half of a Multiflow Map is great for helping students to think about how a change would lead to new effects. If our school had a student council that was as powerful as a principal, what effects would that cause.
Venn Diagram
So let’s take our Venn Diagram. It supports comparing and contrasting. But comparing and contrasting must lead to a decision. Analyze naturally moves towards Evaluate. We compare. We contrast. And then we decide!
It would be SUPER weird to compare and contrast vacation spots but then never pick where you’re going! No one would compare and contrast a Honda Pilot and Toyota Highlander and then stop there. You’d pick a car based on your Analysis! If you have two job offers, you won’t just compare and contrast.
So our students shouldn’t complete a Venn Diagram and then be done. There’s an obvious next step that takes students higher up Bloom’s Taxonomy.
Compare, Contrast, And Then Choose!
If we use a Venn Diagram to compare a cat and dog, we’re setting them up to then make a choice.
But I don’t want that choice to be something dull like, “Which animal is better?” Instead, let’s ask a sharp evaluative question like, “If you had to survive in your town as one of these animals, which would you choose?” (Here’s how I sharpen questions.)
Then, I need to go back and make sure my Analyze task helps students to answer this sharp question. My Venn Diagram must be about comparing and contrasting the defensive adaptations of a dog and a cat, not just dogs and cats generally.
The Venn Diagram is Part of a Sequence
See how the Venn Diagram is just a scaffold? It’s a part of a larger sequence of questions:
- Compare and Contrast the defensive adaptations of cats vs dogs. (The Venn Diagram is here.)
- Pick which animal you’d rather be if you had to survive in our town.
- Imagine that a dog and cat decide to trade one adaptation for another. Which adaptations would they settle on?
- Write a story starring either the new dog or new cat. They’ll be surviving in town using their new set of adaptations.
Do you see what a disaster it was when I had my class stop at the Venn Diagram? We lost the opportunity to do all of this great thinking! I’d much rather walk into a classroom covered in stories about mutant cat adaptations than dozens of identical Venn Diagrams.
For Byrdseed.TV subscribers, there’s a video version of this essay.