Planning & Organizing

John Hattie talks about the idea of concept mapping having an effect size of 0.60. In other words, when students look back at what they've learned and attempt to assimilate new information in to that schema, they learn the material deeper and retain it longer. It's important to note from John Hattie's Visible Learning, however, that "Concept mapping is effective when it is used as a planning tool for something else. If its use is limited to filling it out and then setting it aside, it is no longer effective."

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Planning

Many teachers use worksheets to help students map out their thinking as a prewriting exercise. Unfortunately, this takes away an opportunity to teach students how to map out their thinking AND reorganize it as they need to. They need to learn to record ideas with the intention to make something. This could obviously be done in the thought book, but I prefer a more versatile method. For example, real writing rarely stays in the same form it was first written in. Good authors move their writing around and remove pieces as its being developed. To encourage this, I like to have students use post-it notes or small pieces of paper they can write on over the course of many days or weeks. They will typically keep them in their thoughtbooks until they're ready to begin organizing. What do they write on the post-its? Potential thesis statements, Specific quotes or lines from their reading, personal experiences they could use, past texts that connect, etc. This concept of planning doesn't just have to be for writing essays, as I've used it for all forms of PBL as well.

Organizing

After students record ideas that could be used to create, they need to begin organizing those thoughts. There are various ways (a few pictures above) from just laying out their thoughts on their desk or a white board to creating a table of contents, but the focus is to organize ideas and concepts and connect how they relate or could be used.

Creating

Using mind maps to plan out products the students will create is the ultimate goal. These can be created on free programs that are more permanent like Padlet, so the students can return to the software and add information as they learn. The above picture has 4 different colors representing different pieces: texts (white), notes (yellow), thoughts & questions (pink), and the beginning of an annotated bibliography (blue).

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