Welcome!

Thank you for chosing to particpate in our blog, "It's all about the I". This forum provides an opportunity for collaboration around the topic of high quality instruction.


Each month please read the chapter that correlates with the monthly topic, respond to the "Read and Reflect" and the "Discuss" section and post your responses on the blog. Also, please use ideas from the "Do" section to apply the monthly topic in your classroom and post your experience. I encourage you to comment on other blog member's posts. The more interactive we make our blog the more we will gain from the experience!


All posts should be complete by the last day of the month. Then we will be on to another topic!!


Monday, March 26, 2012

March - Cues, Questions, and Advance Organizers

I apologize for the long delay, this school year is flying by. Our chapter for March is Cues, Questions, and Advance Organizers. I will post April's chapter at the beginning of the month, but because of my delay, we can of course continue to discuss March's topic as well. 

March's chapter is all about activating prior knowledge through cues, questions and advance organizers. Cues and questions are excellent tools that a teacher can utilize to activate prior knowledge, expand students' understanding of a topic, and also help the students spark an interest in the subject. It is also vital to assessing the students' prior knowledge before beginning a new subject. Here, everyone should share examples of cues or questioning that they use in class, maybe even in a specific context. 

The chapter also addresses advance organizers that help students utilize their background knowledge when learning new material. Advance organizers are great when using information that is extremely disorganized, as it can help students begin to organize old information with new information that they are exposed to. The chapter introduces three different kinds of advance organizers, Narrative, Skimming, and Graphic. 

Perhaps everyone could share examples of how they activate prior knowledge through activities that are introduced in the chapter, or other scaffolding activities that are not discussed in the book. 

An excellent activity to activate prior knowledge that many teachers are familiar with is a word splash, which works particularly well in a history class. The teacher writes one key word or broad term on the board and ask students to come up and write words that they think relate to the key word or broad term.

For example, last year I wrote "Civil War" on the board and asked students to write words that they thought related to the Civil War.

Civil War
Union
North vs. South
Slavery
Split
Confederacy
Southerners
Abe Lincoln
Gettysburg
Trench Warfare

These were some of the words that the students wrote on the board. From there, I was able to correct any misunderstandings, while at the same time assessing how much the students already knew about the Civil War before beginning formal instruction. Following a word splash such as this one, the teacher can then ask students to organize the information and begin to draw comparisons.







1 comment:

  1. Do you feel that your students are able to analyze data/information effectively? What other "higher-order thinking" skills do you use in your class? I ask because all of the students that I have that have you or Mr. G as a teacher seem to really get a lot from your class and actually be interested in the topic!

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