Differentiating with Graphic Organizers: Tools to Foster Critical and Creative Thinking, Sep/2008

Use graphic organizers to challenge students, make learning exciting, and raise academic achievement!

Graphic organizers have proven to be successful tools for helping students develop their critical and creative thinking skills. This research-based resource shows how graphic organizers can improve teaching practices, help differentiate instruction in the classroom, and raise learning outcomes for all students, including English language learners and students with learning disabilities.

The author presents graphic organizers for nine types of thinking processes based on Bloom's taxonomy and offers examples of how to apply the graphic organizers in different subject areas and grade levels. This hands-on guide demonstrates how teachers can:

1. Promote the critical thinking processes of assuming, inferring, analyzing, prioritizing, and judging
2. Encourage the creative thinking processes of brainstorming, connecting, creating, and elaborating
3. Modify graphic organizers or create their own to meet individual learning needs

With assessment rubrics for providing quality feedback included, Differentiating With Graphic Organizers addresses ways to promote and build students’ creative reasoning, communication, and problem-solving skills and make the learning process a success.

About The Author:
Patti Drapeau is an educational consultant, trainer, author, and internationally known presenter. She has over twenty-five years of classroom experience teaching students and coordinating programs in Freeport, Maine. Drapeau currently serves as adjunct faculty at the University of Southern Maine, where she teaches graduate courses in differentiation, curriculum integration, critical and creative thinking, education of the gifted and talented, and curriculum and methods for teaching gifted and talented students. She is also a certified trainer for the IIM (Independent Investigation Method) research model.

Drapeau developed a curriculum model for the regular classroom called “Affective Perspectives: Combining Critical Thinking, Creative Thinking, and Affect.” She has authored a variety of articles for the “Maine Exchange” and is the author of the best-selling book Great Teaching with Graphic Organizers, published by Scholastic Publishers.

Drapeau is an international presenter in the United States and Canada, presenting at hundreds of national, state, and regional conferences as well as conducting district workshops focused on the needs of all students. She presents keynotes and workshop sessions that are designed to be:

1. Researched based
2. Practical
3. Interactive
4. Product oriented
5. Customized