Lesson Organizer Routine: Instructor’s Manual

About the Author

Keith Lenz, Ph.D.

Affliations

 

Senior Disability Researcher
SRI International
Menlo Park, CA

 

President
Velvet Bridge, Inc.
Kansas City, MO

 

Retired Senior Research Scientist
Certified Professional Development Specialist
University of Kansas Center for Research on Learning
Lawrence, KS

 

Retired Associate Professor
Department of Special Education
University of Kansas
Lawrence, KS

My Background and Interests
My memories of elementary school are that I did what teachers asked me to do, and that if I did what the teachers asked, school was going as it was intended to go. I didn’t realize that learning was up to me and that I should at some point start assuming some responsibility for my own learning. Around 4th and 5th grade, I started to get into trouble with teachers because I wasn’t doing homework assignments. I really believed that schoolwork was done at school and that homework included all the activities I normally did at home, and they were mostly play activities. I didn’t connect independent effort and responsibility with schoolwork until my 6th grade teacher, Mrs. Mason, began to make the connection very explicit. Needless to say, because my 4th- and 5th-grade learning experiences were very dismal, 6th grade required a lot of hard work to make up for my earlier failures.

In many ways, the feelings of failure that I had in 6th grade have helped me greatly during my career. I know what it feels like to be caught cheating on a math test, face the principal’s grim questions about why none of the first 75 pages of my social studies workbook have been completed, see column after column of D’s and F’s on my report card, and continuously struggle to understand what I was doing wrong in school. Looking back, those early experiences and feelings made me understand what it feels like not to understand how to learn. Not only did I struggle with learning, but I also watched many of my classmates struggle with teachers who taught on the surface without barely a thought or concern about unlocking learning for any of us.

I had to figure out how to learn on my own. I eventually became a teacher myself, teaching at the junior high school, high school, and university levels. As I learned how to teach, those memories of my schooling kept me honest about what I wanted to do in my teaching. Also, when I became a researcher, I realized that I wanted to make learning easy for students. I wanted to develop teaching methods and materials that would help them become good learners.

I will be the first to admit that I have not always been a good learner or a good teacher. However, I have always wanted to be a better learner and a better teacher. Working with my colleagues to develop learning strategy instruction, the Content Enhancement Routines, and other interventions related to strategic instruction has taken me exactly where I know I needed to go in order to help teachers teach better and to help students learn what they need to learn. I know that these are the tools that my teachers needed to use when teaching me years ago.

The Story Behind The Lesson Organizer Routine
They say that educational researchers are sometimes motivated to do research in which they have a personal stake. I know that some of my colleagues became interested in special education because they had a child with special needs. I believe that I became interested in doing research on how to be more organized as a teacher because I personally wanted to be more organized. In addition, as research in learning strategies began to evolve, my thoughts turned to the role that a teacher might play in compensating for a student’s poor organizational strategies while content is being delivered.

Thus, the story about the Lesson Organizer Routine begins with the thinking that I was doing around 1980 in preparation for research for my doctoral dissertation. While my mentors and fellow students were focused on how to design and teach learning strategies, I began to think about how teachers might strategically teach content when students do not have organizational skills. During this time, I stumbled on a review of research comparing the effects of advance-lesson organizers versus post-lesson organizers on learning. My thoughts turned to the notion that teacher organization is critical for students who have poor organizational skills. I reasoned that teachers might actually be able to compensate for a student’s inefficient and ineffective learning strategies related to organizing content if they were more explicit and organized about what they were teaching.

In thinking more about what teachers might do to be more explicit and more organized, I concluded that focusing solely on organizers at either the beginning or the end of a lesson was an odd way of thinking about teaching. Why wouldn’t a teacher simply plan to be more organized before, during, and at the end of the lesson? I also remembered the adage that I had learned in high school about the effective delivery of content in a speech: “Tell them what you are going to tell them; tell them; tell them what you have told them.”

From our early studies of lesson organization, we learned that teacher organization of content was very important to student learning. However, equally important, we also learned that students frequently did not detect and use teacher organization to guide their learning. We learned that many students need to be taught how to use teachers’ organizers to profit from them. In later studies, we learned that lesson organization was inherently linked to unit organization. Lesson planning and lesson organizers needed to evolve from decisions that are made at the unit level. Thus, the Lesson Organizer Routine logically became an extension of the Unit Organizer Routine. It is used by a teacher to infuse any lesson with organization cues and prompts before, during, and at the end of the lesson.

My thoughts About Content Enhancement Routines
I believe that the Content Enhancement Routines are comprised of those practices that we currently know are effective for teaching critical content to academically diverse groups of students. Several elements embedded in each of these routines reflect the evidenced-based practices that should be incorporated into content-area teaching. First, carefully designed graphic organizers are used in each routine to allow teachers to focus student attention on critical content. Second, detailed implementation guidelines are provided that supply details related to how each graphic-organizer teaching device should be used in order to replicate the results of the original research. These guidelines are captured in “Linking Steps” for each routine, and each step is linked to how each section of the graphic organizer should be used to verbally lead students to organize, understand, and remember critical content. The verbal supports used by the teacher ensure that each graphic-organizer teaching device become more than just another graphic organizer. Third, explicit procedures are given in the manual that are related to how to use the teaching devices to grow a “teaching routine” that students can expect the teacher to use repeatedly throughout the school year to model and encourage the development of strategic patterns of thinking. As students repeatedly experience the routine, they learn how to use the device independently to become more strategic in completing tasks. Finally, when the devices and routines are used with sufficient explicitness, rigor, and frequency, they can be used to prompt the development of both general and content-specific literacy and reasoning strategies.

I would like to see all teachers consider using Content Enhancement Routines to improve their teaching in relation to academically diverse groups of students. In the beginning, use of these routines does require some really deep thinking about what is truly critical for all students to learn. Accurately selecting the most critical content that all students should be expected to learn is the most difficult step in the overall process of implementing any Content Enhancement Routine. The device associated with each Content Enhancement Routine then becomes a tool to help teachers ensure that the most critical content is explicitly taught and learned by all students. I have heard some people use the expression, “Garbage in; garbage out.” To me, this means we can teach dumb stuff really well, but the learning that is produced doesn’t amount to much. This orientation to teaching won’t help us improve student scores on critical outcome measures. Thus, the careful consideration of what is truly critical to teach and to enhance is the first step to improving teaching in content-area courses.

As a footnote to these remarks about the implementation of Content Enhancement Routines, I want to mention two components that I believe provide important supports to the effective use of the routines. First, computer software called GIST has been developed to help teachers develop, plan for the integration of, and present and use Content Enhancement devices with students. A GIST software purchase comes with the graphic organizer templates for the Course Organizer Routine, the Unit Organizer Routine, and the Lesson Organizer Routine ( www.gistplan.com ). Templates for the other routines in the Content Enhancement series are also available for purchase. What is important about the software is that is allows for the integration and digital creation, adaptation, and reuse of each device. Second, a library of devices completed by teachers in a variety of subject areas is available for free downloading and sharing to help teachers get started with the content enhancement planning process. The content enhancement library of devices is called Depot and can be found at www.stratepedia.org.

Teacher Feedback on the Lesson Organizer Routine
When I talk to students about the use of organizers by teachers, they consistently tell me that teachers should use more organizers than they are currently using. For example, one middle-school teacher who had been using Unit Organizers for the past year asked me to come into his classroom and talk to his students about what they thought about his use of the routine in his teaching. When I talked to them, they told me that the Expanded Unit Map, the second page of the Unit Organizer in which the teacher expands the map of content, did not provide enough space for them to map the content. They told me: “We want each of the content bubbles on the Expanded Unit Map to have its own page, so we have more room to add the information that goes with each content bubble.”

In essence, that is what the Lesson Organizer device does. I have found that teachers who teach in subject areas that require sequential mastery of information in order to move forward in learning find the Lesson Organizer Routine particularly relevant and helpful in their teaching. These subject areas typically reflect more skill-oriented subjects such as math courses and foreign language courses that require careful skill sequencing, practice, and mastery.

Many elementary school teachers teaching at the 3rd- and 4th-grade levels also report that they prefer the Lesson Organizer Routine over the Unit Organizer Routine. I have found that, regardless of whether a teacher uses the Lesson Organizer with students, even for a teacher younger students, the process of graphically planning what to teach and then using the Lesson Organizer to guide teaching results in very powerful teaching. In every instance, the goal is to make teaching more explicit, and the Lesson Organizer Routine helps teachers accomplish this.

My Contact Information
Please contact me at keith.lenz@sri.com