Purpose of paragraphing
I was just thinking about how one of the most powerful learning experiences I had in my career as a teacher was being involved in K-12 writing reviews. We gathered writing samples from across schools and grades all written to the same topic and looked for trends.
That's how I saw that ELs tended to write pages and pages of strings of sentences. They didn't know how to group like ideas together to avoid redundancy and develop an argument.
And this is how I started to think I needed to come up with an analogy for organizing info into paragraphs.
You have to organize details into paragraphs just like you organize your clothes into drawers.
Ali is helping me think it through and get it right. Katja thinks it will work.
Initially a chest of drawers seems like a helpful analogy. To teach multiple ways to organize within informational writing, you'd have to extend the analogy to say something like, "but maybe it works better for you to have a whole outfit ready. When you open one drawer, you have one t-shirt, one pair of pants, and one pair of socks that all go together."
ReplyDeleteBut... a dresser (or chest of drawers) is always a dresser with separate drawers that don't overlap or connect. So the analogy isn't flexible enough for the kind of thinking required to organize ideas for comparison or cause and effect or sequence. Even at the paragraph level, you organize sentences differently for different purposes.
Graphic organizers reinforce the relationship among ideas or information and call for thinking in different ways to see the relationships. That's what's missing here - being able to see how ideas or information relate to other ideas or information and how to organize it in different ways.
Food for thought...