Graphic organizers help students that think logically like scientists and mathematicians. They also help special education students that benefit from organizing and visualizing their thoughts before writing a formal sentence. If you use big enough poster paper, graphic organizers can also be a great tool for collaborative learning where students converse about the connections between the topics, themes, quotes, characters, plot, and places in a story or poem. It’s one of the main ways teachers differentiate for students.
Graph
A graph is a great way to get students to think about character development. In Hamlet, students look at four soliloquies and then the scene in the graveyard where he holds Yorick’s skull. Time or page numbers appear on the bottom of the graph, and options for the left side of the graph include anger, agency, madness, or violence. Each dot or bar on the graph includes a few quotes to show his development from one part of the play to the next.
Charts
Students could represent the percentage of a character’s emotions in a novel or passage with a pie chart. Each section of the chart could contain a quote that relates to each emotion or idea, like joy, anger, imagination, family, power, hope, or doubt.
Timeline
A timeline feels straightforward, but students could include parallel events on either side of the timeline. This visual shows the connection between two quotes or behaviors. During a unit on The Kite Runner, students plot two timelines, a timeline of Amir’s life and a timeline of the history of Afghanistan and America. They then visually connect the two narratives with lines and arrows.
Venn Diagram
If students want to contrast two characters, places, or themes, and then find points of comparison, a Venn diagram will help them organize their thoughts.
T-Chart
T-charts allow students to list quotes on one side and an analysis of a quote on the other. They could also compare characters or ideas and match up one side of the chart to the other.
Mind Map
Mind maps are similar to bubble maps, spider diagrams, flow charts, and concept maps. This is where students demonstrate the connections between ideas, events, or places with circles, lines, arrows, or other shapes and colors. They can begin with a central idea and move outwards or they can move from one idea to the next. Each idea can have a quote from the text appear in a connecting bubble. Or students can use an image like a tree or car to graphically represent their ideas. If you want to give students complete freedom to make sense of a chapter or passage, you could assign sketchnotes, where students find their own creative way to write down their analysis.
Before students present, I take a picture of the poster with the Genius app and display it on a projector screen so I can zoom in on their responses. When they present their poster to the class, they have to form sentences that connect their ideas. Students will sometimes write an analytical sentence in an essay without thinking about how it is related to their other quotes or ideas, so this approach should encourage them to use what the College Board calls a “line of reasoning” and think of a variety of different ideas that are not redundant and that logically extend their main idea.
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