Graphic Organizer FAIL

Graphic Organizers are something I never used in school; however, from the first day of my program at GSU I have been told that they are great. They are supposed to help students visualize the information and the connections between the facts. Here are some examples for everyone who has also never heard of them:

 

Because the students seems bored with the extensive closed notes (notes where key words and phrases are missing) and never looked at them again once they were completed, I thought I would try to utilize a graphic organizer. This enables the students to write the information in their own words and is not quite as wordy. 

This is the one I used. I was very excited about it and put a lot of effort into making a corresponding PowerPoint. Another reason which I thought this would be a good tool is that it enables me to create a less wordy PowerPoint, which keeps me from just reading from the PowerPoint.

Unfortunately, as you can tell from the title of this post, it didn't really work out. The students were confused by the lack of structure and did not know what to write down or when to write it. Even with my prompts, many students were confused. So, it was basically a fail. In retrospect, it probably wasn't a great idea to change the style of note taking on the student over halfway through the school year.

My mentor suggested that graphic organizers be used for a review or reteaching of information previously learned. But, I will keep working on my lecturing skill, and are going to revert back to their usual style of note taking for their comfort.

On a positive note, my closing activity/assessment went really well. I basically had them choose between the four "topics" for the day (see above) and tell me how it related to the essential question (center question on the graphic organizer).

Creative

I was able to create a long (40 word) vocabulary quiz over the weekend as well as a reading quiz. I am getting a lot more practice creating assessments. This will be great experience.

I am still finding giving lectures less than satisfying. I have never possessed the skill for telling stories or jokes, so I am not very surprised that I am struggling with presenting lectures prepared by another person. I think that I would do a better job with a presentation which I created, however, I do doubt that I will ever depend heavily on lectures in my classroom.

During my class at GSU today we had a guest speaker who gave us a lot of really creative ideas, which I am excited to use. I am really looking forward to creating my own lessons which I can feel more comfortable teaching.

I wanted to end this post with a student quote:
"So, Teddy Roosevelt was like the Chuck Norris of his day?"

Lectures

A point that has been stressed by GSU many times is that lecturing is boring to most students and they only retain/memorize the information long enough to take a test, without much long term meaning or relevance. Today, I was lecturing about the causes of WWI using a PowerPoint that my teacher provided. The topic wasn't uninteresting and the PowerPoint was well done. However, a majority of the students were bored. Even I was bored with it.

An aspect of teaching that I miss from Sweetwater is all of the activity. I hope that I will be able to incorporate more activities as I plan more lessons. Different activities include photo analysis, reading primary documents, and creating posters or pamphlets. Every day can't be an activity - sometimes you just have to learn the facts. However, I hope that I will be able to make my classes interesting and active.