GRAPHIC

ORGANIZER
MULTI
PACK
TEACHER’S GUIDE
 GRAPHIC ORGANIZER
MULTI-PACK
TEACHER’S GUIDE
Copyright ©2017 by Jennifer Gonzalez

The templates in this product are protected by copyright. Your single-user license
gives you permission to use them to create graphic organizers for your classroom
only. You have permission to reproduce and distribute any organizer you create with
them for any educational, non-commercial purpose.

You may keep electronic or paper copies of the templates or graphic organizers you
create with them in multiple places for your own or student use: on your home
computer, school computer, personal devices, and student-accessible devices.

Reproducing or sharing these templates with other users, including through Google
Drive, is considered a violation of copyright. If you would like to share with other
teachers, please purchase additional user licenses by going to “My Purchases” in
your TPT account. Thank you for respecting the time and effort it took to create this
product.

Questions and Customer Support:

support@cultofpedagogy.com
 USING GRAPHIC ORGANIZERS 4

CONTENTS
TABLE OF
WHY GRAPHIC ORGANIZERS
WORK SO WELL 4

10 USES FOR
GRAPHIC ORGANIZERS 5

TIPS FOR USING GRAPHIC

ORGANIZERS EFFECTIVELY 9

USING THE ORGANIZERS IN

GOOGLE DRIVE 11

CUSTOMIZING THE ORGANIZERS

(LIST OF VIDEO TUTORIALS) 12

REFERENCES 14

ABOUT THE AUTHOR 15

MORE FROM CULT OF PEDAGOGY 16

 Some of our most powerful instructional tools have been

USING GRAPHIC ORGANIZERS

hanging around forever, just waiting for us to notice
them.
One of those tools is the graphic organizer. It's so
simple—just a few shapes and lines, nothing fabulous, no
bells or whistles—and yet beneath its simplicity lies an
absolute dynamo, a vehicle that can cement learning
more firmly than a lot of the other stuff we try, in a lot
less time.
Let's take a quick look at why graphic organizers are so
powerful, explore some ways to use them that you may
not have tried, and consider a few important tips for
using them with the greatest impact.

WHY GRAPHIC ORGANIZERS WORK SO WELL

According to Allan Paivio's theory of dual coding,
humans process information in both visual and verbal
form. When we see the word "book," we picture a book in
our minds, because we've had plenty of real-life
experiences with books. When we're learning new words
or concepts, it's helpful to try to form mental images for
those ideas to reinforce their meanings.
While some approaches like doodling and the mind's eye
strategy apply this theory by having learners create
physical and mental pictures of concepts, a graphic
organizer keeps the words, but arranges them on a page
visually so we better understand how concepts are
related. Decades of research with various age groups and
in different content areas has shown that in general,
when graphic organizers are incorporated into instruction,
student learning improves (Hall & Strangman, 2002).
Graphic organizers also help us meet the needs of all
learners. Presenting information in both text and graphic

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GRAPHIC ORGANIZER MULTI-PACK | ©2017 CULT OF PEDAGOGY 4
 formats is one of the most basic ways to make a lesson
accessible to more students—the basis of Universal Design
for Learning—and graphic organizers definitely fit the bill
there. In fact, much of the research on graphic organizers
has focused on how powerfully they can impact the
learning of students with learning disabilities and special
needs (Dexter, Park, & Hughes, 2011; Douglas, Ayres,
Langone, & Bramlett, 2011).

10 USES FOR GRAPHIC ORGANIZERS

1. Note Taking
Have students use graphic organizers to take notes on their
reading, when doing research, while watching a film, or
while listening to a podcast. If you are already familiar with
the content and how it's structured, you might choose or
design an organizer ahead of time for students, which
research says can be more effective and efficient than
having students create their own. (See the Tips section
below for more information on this.)

2. Lecture Support
Instead of giving a lecture with a standard PowerPoint or an
outline, present your content in a graphic organizer. This
will instantly give students a way to visualize how the
concepts are related to each other. If students ever give
their own presentations, have them try using graphic
organizers to present their information.

3. Pre-Writing
Having students use graphic organizers to plan and
structure their ideas before putting them into a draft is a
common practice in English language arts classes. If you've
never tried it, it's worth adding this into your writing
process, especially if you teach a content area where writing

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 isn't a regular part of student work. A warning: Do not treat
the organizers as the writing piece; have students just jot
notes down in these, rather than complete sentences. The
bulk of student writing time should be spent actually
drafting their piece.

4. Text Illustrations
When students do expository or argumentative writing,
consider having them add a graphic organizer to their
finished product to illustrate a concept in their piece. In this
case, the organizer would NOT be a pre-writing tool, but a
supportive diagram to aid in their own readers'
comprehension. This may not work for all topics, but if a
student is writing about how bees make honey, for
example, a diagram that shows the process from flower to
honey would go a lot further to help the reader understand
than a downloaded image of a bee hovering over a flower.
As students create diagrams to support their own texts,
they will be more likely to pay attention to those that
appear in the texts they read.

5. Pre-Reading
As students get older and are faced with more challenging
texts, especially in content areas outside of English
language arts, their comprehension gets a considerable
boost if they are trained to identify the text structure prior
to reading (Baxter & Reddy, 2007, p. 23). Some common
text structures are compare and contrast, description,
problem-solution, cause and effect, and sequence of
events. Once the structure has been identified, students
can complete a supporting graphic organizer while they
read and fill in the components as they encounter them.

Another pre-reading graphic organizer is the KWL chart,

which helps activate prior knowledge before reading and

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 primes students to read with a purpose. KWL charts can
work for any age group and can be used for single texts or
at the beginning, middle, and end of an entire unit.
To read a comprehensive overview of research on graphic
organizers as a reading strategy, see Manoli &
Papadopoulou, 2012.

6. Assessment
Instead of assessing student learning with a quiz (or as a
question on a test), try having students complete a graphic
organizer that shows the relationships between various
terms or concepts. Although this will not work for all
content, it might be just right for evaluating whether a
student understands the bigger picture of a body of
content.

7. Thinking Tool
When we deliver content to students through lecture,
readings, or video, our next step should be to have
students interact with the content in some way. This can be
accomplished with class discussions, lab work, or project-
based learning. Another simple class activity that gives
students a chance to grapple with the content is
completing a graphic organizer: In groups, pairs, or even on
their own, have students organize chunks of the content
into graphic organizers, then compare their results to other
groups. For example, if a foreign language class is studying
vocabulary words for food, they could use a hierarchical
organizer to organize "food" words into smaller groups, like
meats, fruits, vegetables, and so on. This kind of sorting
gives them more interaction with the terms and helps them
work with similarities and differences, another powerful
instructional strategy.

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 8. Unit Planning
When introducing a unit to students, show them how the
parts of the unit fit together with a graphic organizer. Not
only will this give them a sense of where you are in the unit
at any given time, it should also help them understand why
they are learning the individual parts. Bonus: Doing this
exercise yourself could help you decide what concepts are
most important for students to learn, and identify other
things that may be "nice to know," but aren't necessarily
vital to student understanding.

9. Classroom Management
Too often we hear “management” and think of dealing with
problems, but a huge part of effectively managing a
classroom is making your policies, procedures, and
expectations crystal clear. Teachers often make signs listing
class rules and procedures in writing, but putting the most
important ones into graphic form will increase the
likelihood that students will follow them.

10. Retrieval Practice

Using regular retrieval practice can help students learn and
retain information more effectively. One retrieval practice
technique is called a Brain Dump, where students try to
recall as much as they can about a given topic, without the
aid of any supporting texts. After doing the dump, students
are then allowed to check their texts to confirm, correct, or
add to the information they retrieved. But if we added a
step—having students sort their dumped information into
some kind of graphic organizer, possibly even working in
pairs to do so—then have them go to the text, it could
further solidify the benefit of the retrieval and help them
get very clear on where they have gaps in their knowledge.

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 TIPS FOR USING GRAPHIC ORGANIZERS EFFECTIVELY
Model how to use the organizers.
If students aren't taught how to use graphic organizers
through teacher modeling and guided practice, they won't
get much from them. So take the extra step and model
their use.

Avoid complete sentences.

Unless you have a very good reason to insist that students
use complete sentences on their organizers, don't do it.
Complete sentences take up too much space, they take
longer to write, and the effort to hold students accountable
misses the whole point of the organizer. Show students
how to use bullet points and sentence fragments to get
ideas down and show how they are related.

For complex material, consider teacher-generated

organizers.
In a 2007 study, students who were presented with author-
created graphic organizers along with reading materials
produced evidence of deeper learning in less time than
those who had to produce their own graphic organizers
(Stull & Mayer, 2007). When you present these to students,
consider filling them only partially and having students
complete the rest; this has been shown to help students
recall information more effectively and teach them how to
take graphic organizer notes on their own (Robinson et al.,
2006).

Let students color outside the lines. Literally.

As sketchnotes grow in popularity, educators are starting to
recognize the power of doodling as a learning tool. Graphic
organizers can be enhanced with small doodles and other

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 notes that fall outside the basic structure of the organizer.
As long as the student can still see the original structure
and the drawings make sense to him or her, these
"enhanced" organizers can reinforce concepts even more
deeply.

Offer a variety of organizers for day-to-day use.

Once students become familiar with a certain type of
organizer, they may find other uses for it that you haven't
even thought of. If you make these available to them in the
same way that you might provide dictionaries or pencil
sharpeners, you might find that students start using them
even when they haven't been assigned.

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 Every template in this multi-pack is also available as a

GOOGLE DRIVE
USING THE ORGANIZERS IN
Google Slides file. To access the files, follow these steps:

1. Click this link to access the templates:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B4j-
ofhKeVcnMG1RZlRCSHpvRkk?usp=sharing

2. The files should open in Google Drive. However, you

do not have permission to edit these files; they are set
to “View Only.” To add all the files to your Google
Drive, which will give you your own copies that you
can edit, click on all of the file thumbnails while
holding down the CTRL button, right click, then
choose “Make a copy.”

3. All 15 files will now appear in your Google Drive and

you will have the ability to edit them to suit your
needs.

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 All of the templates in this Rubric Pack are completely

CUSTOMIZINGTHE ORGANIZERS
customizable and editable. You can change fonts, colors,
or the structure of the templates to suit your needs.

VIDEO TUTORIALS
Four video tutorials are included with these organizers to
show you how to make specific changes. The tutorials are
available for both the PowerPoint templates and the
Google Slides templates. The tutorials are listed below.
PowerPoint Tutorials
1. Working with Shapes
2. Working with Text Boxes
3. Working with Tables
4. Printing and Saving as PDF

Google Slides Tutorials

1. Working with Shapes
2. Working with Text Boxes
3. Working with Tables
4. Printing, Saving as PDF, and Sharing

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 REDUCING FILE SIZE (WINDOWS ONLY)
The templates for Windows computers have a font
embedded into them (Raleway). This makes the file size
bigger than usual. If you do not plan to use these fonts or
just want to reduce the file size, follow these steps:

(1) Open a template, then go to FILE – OPTIONS.

(2) Click SAVE in the sidebar. Near the bottom of the
screen that opens up, you’ll see a line that says
“Embed fonts in the file.” It will be checked. To stop
embedding, uncheck that box, then save the file
again and it should be a much smaller file size.

Alternately, you may want to just install these fonts on

your computer. If they are already installed, there will be
no need to embed them.

To download the whole Open Sans family for free, visit

https://www.1001freefonts.com/open_sans.font

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 Baxter, S., & Reddy, L. (2007). What content-area teachers should

REFERENCES
know about adolescent literacy. National Institute for Literacy.
Retrieved from
https://lincs.ed.gov/publications/pdf/adolescent_literacy07.pdf.

Dexter, D. D., Park, Y. J., & Hughes, C. A. (2011). A meta‐analytic review

of graphic organizers and science instruction for adolescents with
learning disabilities: Implications for the intermediate and
secondary science classroom. Learning Disabilities Research &
Practice, 26(4), 204-213.

Douglas, K. H., Ayres, K. M., Langone, J., & Bramlett, V. B. (2011). The
effectiveness of electronic text and pictorial graphic organizers to
improve comprehension related to functional skills. Journal of
Special Education Technology, 26(1), 43-56.

Hall, T., & Strangman, N. (2002). Graphic organizers. Wakefield, MA:

National Center on Accessing the General Curriculum. Retrieved
March 20, 2009.

Manoli, P., & Papadopoulou, M. (2012). Graphic organizers as a reading

strategy: Research findings and issues. Creative education, 3(03),
348.

Robinson, D. H., Katayama, A. D., Beth, A., Odom, S., Hsieh, Y. P., &
Vanderveen, A. (2006). Increasing text comprehension and
graphic note taking using a partial graphic organizer. The Journal
of Educational Research, 100(2), 103-111.

Stull, A. T., & Mayer, R. E. (2007). Learning by doing versus learning by

viewing: Three experimental comparisons of learner-generated
versus author-provided graphic organizers. Journal of Educational
Psychology, 99(4), 808.

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 AUTHOR
ABOUT THE

Jennifer Gonzalez is the creator of Cult of Pedagogy, a

website that has been helping teachers crush it in the
classroom since 2013. She has over 10 years of classroom
experience at the middle school and college level and is a
National Board Certified Teacher in Early Adolescence/
English Language Arts.

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