A web-based program that allows users to create Maps, lessons and assessments while enhancing writing skills. Monitor progress towards school and district learning goals and develop your Thinking Maps Plan of Action. An expansive collection of 23 video-based Professional Development modules for anytime, anywhere learning.
An ever-growing collection showcasing professionally vetted Maps across grade levels and subject areas. Your initial Thinking Maps Training is just the beginning of your journey! We offer advanced courses to build the capacity of your staff and maximize the impact of Thinking Maps. Leadership Training. Build a data-driven strategic plan to meet the needs of your teachers and students.
Write from the Beginning Improve writing across the curriculum with brain-based strategies for all writing genres. Path to Proficiency. Meet the needs of English Learners ELs and students with language-based learning challenges. Read The Story. There are two circles: the inside one and the larger one.
The inside circle is the main topic or thoughts, while the larger circle surrounded usually responds with connections and definitions to the main topic. For example, what do learners want to learn IG stories in the inside topic? Some thoughts and questions can be written around this topic in the larger circle. This brainstorming way is the circle map we called. Overall, it is a great way to open and retain more information at the beginning of a given subject.
Bubble maps are a tool to describe a subject using adjectives. This could make learners think more in-depth about a given topic, so in school, students could identify and summary the related adjectives for the subjects, such as animals.
It is also useful for students to describe a situation or character from a fictional book in the classroom. This map could break down the final goal into pieces. Throughout piecing the final goal, it is effective for users to achieve step by step. For example, the goals for the rest of the year are divided into six smaller goals, and each sub-goal can guide me more specifically and concisely.
Overall, this characteristic of the bubble map describes and supports your center topic with more details. The flow map aims to visualize a process and progression. Information and steps of the process can be labeled and identified well and specifically.
This map could also guide people step by step to get access to some entrances or destinations if people need to find their way. In school, the flow map could guide parents and children to registration in school open days.
The multi-flow map focuses on the analysis of reason and results. The left rectangles represent the causes, while the right one shows the possible effects. On some occasions, effects also can be one of the contributions, which creates a feedback loop. Therefore, a multi-flow map is a good way to analyze an event, figuring out the main factors and possible impacts.
For instant, air pollution would produce acid rain and damage human respiratory organs like the lungs. Also, the ozone layer can be broken. All of this is because of the pollution exhaust from factories and cars, and the overuse of mine resources. Brace map aims to the relationship between the parts and the whole subject.
Compared to the treemap, the brace map tends to organize and conceptualize the components of the whole topic. In this age of information overflow and networking, students must be able to use multiple strategies to solve complex problems. In language arts, for example, students are evaluated through their responses to complex reading selections or to an array of writing prompts.
In mathematics, they must solve multistep word problems. The new testing formats require them to complete varied tasks and show their work and reasoning. Unfortunately, most students are not prepared for these layered tasks.
Barbara Bell, principal of the Joe Hall Elementary School in Miami, says one reason she adopted Thinking Maps at her school was that it is particularly difficult to find strategies that work together to develop higher-order thinking skills.
By learning how to use Thinking Maps together, students show they can persevere and not give up in mid-problem. In a learning community, Thinking Maps become a common visual language among students and between students and teachers—not only within content areas but also across disciplines.
In the Thinking Maps transfer approach, we work with whole schools over several years. This is essential because it offers all-important continuous support for students as they move through grade levels. Students learned the maps easily because the maps were reinforced across the whole school. Marilyn Lawrence, director of curriculum in Brooklyn's District 13, has guided implementation of these maps in schools there.
Teachers at Joe Hall Elementary School participated in a year of professional development in Thinking Maps and follow-up support in the classrooms. They then met in groups, by grade. They brought their own curriculum ideas, along with student writing portfolios, including those showing work by bilingual, special education, and gifted students. The teachers agreed that the maps had successfully helped students develop their thinking processes and their ability to organize ideas, improved the quality and quantity of their writing, and also motivated them to learn.
Further, the maps benefited the teachers by helping them organize content and assess student learning. Significantly, the teachers who gave the maps the highest approval rating were those who worked closely with the large population of Spanish-speaking students who are learning English.
They said that the common visual language for thinking enabled their students to transfer patterns of thinking from Spanish into English, to focus on learning, and to build vocabulary. When teachers collect Thinking Maps over time and within student portfolios, many interesting possibilities emerge.
Portfolios enable students and teachers to see how learners are assimilating new knowledge into the big picture of any content area, and how thinking and content knowledge develop incrementally.
Karen Joslin, a teacher at Hurley Elementary School in Salisbury, North Carolina, reviewed the portfolios with her Title I students to decide which Thinking Maps were appropriate to include in their portfolios. In this way, she helped students evaluate what they knew and how they came to construct content knowledge using Thinking Maps with other strategies.
In most schools, teachers find continuous development of student thinking from grade to grade much more elusive than planning the scope and sequence of a curriculum. Yet it is this kind of reinforcement of thinking processes that helps students become independent, reflective learners. Thinking process maps of all kinds become a visual crossroads for consciously linking content with process learning. As with any innovation in education, we have encountered obstacles along with positive changes in implementation.
One of the first hurdles is gaining the commitment of a school's whole faculty to develop a schoolwide design for using these tools. But with time and visible successes, this commitment tends to come. Chadbourn Elementary School in Goldsboro, North Carolina, wrote Thinking Maps into its Chapter I program to prepare students for the state's first annual assessment of 4th graders' writing in February Nearly 90 percent of Chadbourn's students qualify for a free or low-cost lunch.
The first year, teachers systematically introduced the maps, and the second year, they helped students use the maps to organize their writing in response to test prompts. The result? In —93, the 4th graders' writing scores averaged 35 percent—the highest of the 11 district schools tested, and more than 11 percent higher than the district and state averages. In —94, Chadbourn's 4th graders did even better: they finished first with a 51 percent average.
This compared to 31 percent and 34 percent, respectively, for the district and state averages. This past year, Chadbourn's average shot up to 61 percent. Rarely do scores increase so significantly three years in a row. Principal Patricia Austin says Thinking Maps helped her students improve in both the reading and mathematics portions of the test. Then there was the initial workshop at Marcelle Elementary in Mission, Texas, when a teacher specialist, Louise Esau, asked me how she could use these maps with a 4th grader named Richie, who is blind.
Visual tools for the blind?
0コメント