‘Thinking Maps’ to learning
April 6, 2010 by sttalbot
Filed under KCSOS Spotlight
There probably is no more bewildering situation than to find oneself in a new school without the basics to succeed. Students enrolled in the Kern County Superintendent of Schools’ (KCSOS) Court and Community Schools program are often in that situation. They have been unsuccessful in a traditional campus setting and are in danger of dropping out of school.
After creating their double bubble Thinking Map on “Factory Life,” Kajuan Richardson and his group presented the finished product to the class, explaining differences between Industrial Revolution factories and those of today.
Court and Community Schools, adopted a system-wide philosophy and teaching strategy in 2006 called “Thinking Maps®” that has students learning by picturing. Remember getting caught by the teacher as you were doodling during a lecture? Thinking Maps® does not penalize for drawing. It encourages drawing. KCSOS instructors say drawing holds the key for those struggling to learn at every grade level. They call the process visual organization.
As Denisse Gonzalez filled in the text, Angelo Ramos and Billy Wayne created more bubbles to describe American Factories during the Industrial Revolution.
“Thinking Maps® give our students an additional way to express ideas, when sometimes they cannot explain them well with words,” said Community Learning Center (CLC) teacher Stefanie Bye. “Maps help organize information in logical, visual sequences.”
Here is an example. Bye’s high school history class spent the period studying the Industrial Revolution. Bye used computer generated photos and graphics projected on a screen to illustrate factory conditions, as she lectured. Students were called upon to read from the textbook, to provide information. Question and answer sessions developed comparisons of factory conditions during the Industrial Revolution and today. The class then broke out into groups of three-to-four students. Each group was given 20 minutes to create a “Thinking Map” about factory conditions based on what they learned.
Working as a team, Community Learning Center’s Michael Caraballo supplied information, Francisco Limon created the bubbles and Teresa Juhlin filled in the text for their double bubble Thinking Map.
The groups could choose to draw one of seven maps: circle, tree, brace, bubble, double bubble, flow, multi-flow and bridge. It would take too long to explain each in this article, but they all have a purpose. The bubble map is used to describe a topic. A flow map shows how something works and so on.
Most in Bye’s class chose the bubble. The center bubble contained the topic “Factory Conditions.” Radiating out from it, students drew lines to other bubbles that they filled with descriptive phrases about specific conditions and sometimes illustrations of those conditions.
As an example, one student filled a bubble with the words, “When you got hurt at work, you had to leave and not get paid.” Across the room on a different map, another pupil drew a picture representing a man with a hand caught in a conveyor belt next to a bubble that read, “A lot of accidents happened due to the fast moving belts on the machines.” Yet another group used a “double bubble” map with descriptive phrases comparing “Work Then” with “Work Now.”
Community Learning Center student Daniel Guerrero used a colored marking pen to emphasize a bubble map description.
Bye says all the maps have one thing in common, “They make it easier for students to memorize and understand. Maps are also good assessment tools for instructors to see what our students have learned during the day. When it comes to testing, maps help our kids recall basic facts, structure and organization. Their ability to write essays within a timed format has improved greatly because maps help them organize information into paragraph form.”
CLC Principal Christian Shannon was part of the original Court and Community Schools team to receive training from Thinking Maps, Inc., an educational consulting and publishing company located in Cary, N.C. He urged its use in all the classrooms. “Why,” Shannon asked. “Because it gets to the thinking processes that are necessary for students to be successful with today’s content standards. You can utilize it in all content areas. It is not specific to just one.”
