Bright, advanced or gifted and talented students learn to make mental interconnections as a metacognitive skill as they discover contextual relationships in prewriting.
Note: This is the third in a series of five articles explaining Hands-On Process-Writing. Background on the technique can be found in the first article. In this article, innovative brain-based ideas will be explored that can help bright, advanced or gifted and talented students gain some fresh perspectives by using higher-order thinking skills and abstract thinking on how to write in multiple styles and genres – including expository essays, narratives, creative, poetry, persuasive, literary analysis, cause and effect and many others.
Step Two: “Making Sense” Is In the Eye and Mind Of The Beholder…
Once they have spread the cards or papers, either researched or brainstormed, teach the students to simply look at the cards or papers as a whole for several minutes. Do they see any patterns? Are some ideas very similar or very different? Do some of the ideas make better sense than the others? Tell them if an idea does not seem to fit with the others, throw it off the table and keep going until they have between eight and fifteen cards or papers left on the table. This begins the process of working with and reacting to visual and kinesthetic stimuli learning styles.
Instruct them that with the remaining cards or papers, begin moving them around the table to form an arrangement that makes sense to them. It does not matter what kind of “sense” it makes to the teacher, as long as it seems “right” to each student. The students are making mental interconnections, or categorizing the ideas at this point as a metacognitive skill in which they uncover contextual relationships that make sense to them.
Step Three: From Scraps to Maps…
Once finished, have the students copy the exact pattern of ideas precisely as it sits on the table during Step Two into a writing notebook, except now they should be drawing a circle around each idea and randomly labeling each circle as “Idea # 1,"“Idea #2,” “Idea #3,” etc.
Once copied, ask the students to draw lines between the Ideas that seem related in any fashion, or that made sense to them when they were thinking about the relationships among Ideas. One line should connect only two Items! If there are two lines between two Ideas, as a cleaner shortcut students can draw a dashed line between the two Ideas. The students have now begun mapping their concepts of the topic!
Ask the students to briefly label each line on the page to help jog their memories later; answer the question: how does each Idea on the line relate to the other? Is one Idea a subset of the other? Does one cause the other to happen? Did one Idea happen before the other? Does each of the Ideas affect each other?
As an option at this point, you may ask the students to put arrows at the ends of the lines:
--A one-way arrow A ----> B indicates that “A” is either a subset of “B,” or, in other words, “A” is a member of the “B” group (e.g., Hamlet [A] is a member of the Danish royalty [B]); or that “A” causes “B” to happen; or that “A” happened before “B.” Note: students can have one line pointing one way, and a second line pointing back to show that the two Ideas affect each other – this is then represented by a dashed line between the two!
Now, ask the students to count the lines between the Ideas to determine which Idea has the most lines attached to it. Remember to count a dashed line as two lines. Call this Idea with the most lines attached to it the “Important” Idea. If there is a tie, ask the student to say quickly off the top of his or her head which Idea seems more “important.”
While this method works in classrooms across the curriculum, students will learn how to move from a thesis statement to develop an outline using various learning styles in the next installment of the Hands-On Process-Writing articles in Suite101.
