Early adventures in Word Diagrams

I recently picked up a copy of Oliver Caviglioli and David Goodwin’s Organise Ideas. The reason being that I thought it might give me a different sort of input on teaching and learning ideas than I would normally seek out. A number of the ideas in the book link to concepts around Dual Coding, which is a cognitive concept I’ve not knowingly shown a huge amount of interest in. Initially I had the sense that the word ‘drawing’ might get involved, a term likely to send me into cold sweats.

Pleasingly I could not have been more wrong. The book is immensely useful, and practical — highly recommended for all teachers. There are excellent explanations of different types of word diagrams (a term they prefer to graphic organiser) both in terms of what they might be used for, as well as step by step guides as to how to go about trying them out in class. Given my forthcoming new post which has a whole school teaching and learning remit, it’s been useful extra knowledge to add to my repertoire before taking up that position.

As a basic summary, I would recommend the guide on David Goodwin’s ‘Organise Ideas’ website found here. For history teachers in particular, the idea that most text can be broken down into these four structures (Chunk, Compare, Sequence, Cause and Effect) should probably peak our interest:

However, rather than writing a review of the book, I thought I would instead explain a little bit about how I’ve been dabbling with them in my lessons recently. Now, some of you will remember that this is an area that I’ve had some interest in before. Indeed, I think I may have written a History How To on Thinking Maps for the great Mr Greg Thornton. An example of one of my common tasks can be found below.

Students would use some information to fill in the boxes and they would be laid out as a nice sequence. During the academic year 2020/21 I moved away from using these templates (I have about eight for different ways of organising knowledge) for a couple of reasons:

1. Due to us moving around to different year group zones, I didn’t want to be burdened with lots of additional sheets to glue in that could be forgotten, or that would take too much valuable time to photocopy.

2. I felt as though the hassle of printing these off wasn’t all that valuable given that, when it boiled down to it, it was just answering some questions in some jazzy boxes (which lets be honest is a description that can apply to a lot of T+L ideas).

One of the things that we also did in 2020/21 was to move away from heavy Powerpoint usage and more towards the Jo Facer idea of the two-page lesson (although in practice mine are more like four page lessons on a double sided A3). An example of what that looks like (or at least two of the four pages) is shown below, from a Year 7 lesson on the Islamic Golden Age.

One rationale behind that was to ensure that more students, especially those who were lower prior attainers, were reading the text we asked them to read and that they were focused on the text rather than snazzy powerpoint slides that had probably taken an unnecessarily long amount of time to create. We would do lots of whole class reading and then different writing activities, such as those from the Writing Revolution, to complement that and to get students to think about that core knowledge.

Now, I think what we’ve found is that of course this is quite dense information for students, especially those who are struggling readers, to process. Some have struggled to keep up with the reading, or struggle to navigate back through the text when asked to complete tasks based on it. I don’t think the solution is to give those students less reading, lest we go back to the Bart Simpson model of differentiation. But instead we need to give them more access points into this world of challenging non-fiction writing.

And so I’ve returned to word diagrams. One simple idea I’ve been trying has been to have a word diagram pre-prepared at the top of the lesson document which summarises the core ideas of the lesson. That would ensure the key ideas were front-loaded, before students would then encounter them again in more detail, and then encountered a third time when students did tasks based on the reading (going some way to satisfying Graham Nutthall’s rule of three).

An example of this, can be seen below:

I don’t think it’s a particularly radical idea, but it’s something I’ve started trying at least. Many of you will, I’m sure, be familiar with the Access to History series of A-level textbooks, where they use word diagrams at the end of each section. That is another option of course. Indeed, it might be an idea to use the end of the lesson for higher level thinking and word diagram creation, or for amending the above. For example, in the case of the diagram above which discusses methods of preventing disease in the twentieth century, the inter-connectedness of the different factors could be discussed — e.g. how mass communications technology on the right of the diagram, enabled the healthy lifestyle campaigns on the left.

This is an example of a pre-prepared one. Of course, you could also co-construct one with students as you go along. I had a go at this with my Year 8 class covering the Age of Revolutions (a unit I whole-heartedly stole from the magnificent Will Bailey-Watson resources from the HA Fellowship). This lesson was exploring the British reactions to the Age of Revolutions, and distinguished between those who were terrified by them and those who were inspired.

Now the drawback here is that it’s a bit messier, and my handwriting fundamentally sucks, but it was a useful process to discuss this with the students and to have a visual structure to support the analysis of the key ideas (even if it may appear unclear from the photo!) It was also useful to help identify groups who might sit between those two extremes. In the brown pen writing, we were able to look at the actions of the two groups, which followed on from the initial discussion about the features of the two groups. Some of the students made their own versions as we were discussing — also a useful way to recap the key ideas for students who had been absent — a regular problem at the moment I am sure many of you would agree!

Again, to a lot of you I’m sure it’s fairly simple board work — but there was thinking behind it, I promise.

The area where I currently feel least confident is getting students to make their own. Students definitely need to have the knowledge first, and in our mixed attaining classes that can be quite uneven and can lead to a messy lesson experience. I probably need to get over my lack of confidence and have a go, but I know I’d need to think very carefully about how to set that activity up. I think teaching students some of those common word diagram structures would be very helpful, with significant benefit if that was done commonly across the curriculum areas.

Here’s one more word diagram perhaps showing different ways you might go about using word diagrams of any type in your classroom. Very very simple though and I’m sure it’s flawed.

So overall, I’m very much interested again in the power of word diagrams, and look forward to experimenting in my new school, where we have a lot of EAL learners who have weaker literacy skills, but still got the same GCSE History content and challenge to deal with!!!