Talk:Advance Organizers

Comments from Jianwei -- Jianwei Zhang 21:27, 13 May 2008 (EDT)

Two suggestions:

1) You may want to add a few words in the introduction to better background this course: Why should teachers (your learners) care about this topic? For example, you may say something like: Teaching for understanding is an important goal of many teachers. However students often fail to understand what we teach. An important reason is that they don't have the prior knowledge we suppose they have, or they simply have not activated their related knowledge. Advance organizer is a teaching strategy to help students fill the knowledge gap and make connections, so that they can learn the content in a meaningful instead of rote way. A brief paragraph like this will help teachers activate their experiences/knowledge and get interested in your units.

2) You currently provide your lesson plan example in unit 3. Your learners need to read first and work on an example later. I'd prefer to reverse the sequence to foster learning by doing and by examples. Consider if it is possible to provide the lesson plan near the end of unit 1, revisit this example in unit 2 and 3.

Just some thoughts for your reference. Feel free to use or not to use.

Re: Comments from Jianwei -- KFernandez 18:27, 14 May 2008 (EDT)

Thank you for the comments. I added more about advance organizers in unit 1 under background information. I chose not to put this in my introduction because it would defeat the purpose of using the KWL chart (I want to know what prior knowledge they have rather than give them any).

I considered your idea about moving the lesson plan to the first unit. As I tried to take the course (with as little bias as possible), I realized that it would be difficult to critique and reflect on the questions the learner is to answer when they have only skimmed the surface of advance organizers in unit 1. Instead, I added an additional lesson plan at the end of unit 1 for viewing purposes and to gain more exposure to the technological aspect of advance organizers.