BUILDING A KNOWLEDGE BASE FOR ADDRESSING ORGANIZATION

A Dozen Suggestions

*Help students to understand the concept of organization (structure) by identifying organization—and its relationship to purpose or function in a variety of ordinary contexts:

~organization of a house

~organization of a supermarket

~organization of a car

~organization of the body

~organization of tv program

~organization of a debate

(Think of other examples of organization in an ordinary or school context).

*Help students to know that all texts have an overall structure, although not all texts are well structured.

*Remind or have students identify the organization of a story (Somebody-Wanted-But-So, for example)

(Play SWBS Game)

*Have students learn the names of the 8 types of organization used in S.P.O.K.E.S.

(Play Bingo Game)

*Relate the idea of organization to the concept of main idea.

(Read a SPOKES text example, identify the main idea, and then identify the text structure.)

*Identify for students the common types of organization in science, social studies, and math.  Relate to the grade level expectations if appropriate.

*Discuss with students the relationship between purpose and organization.  Form follows function!

*Discuss with students the ways in which textbook authors usually give clues to the type of organization in titles, subtitles, introductory paragraphs, concluding paragraphs, questions embedded in and at the end of a section or chapter or unit.

(Using at least two textbooks, identify purpose and organization in several chapters).

*Work with students to identify (and later create) each type of organization at the sentence level, starting with two types that can be easily discriminated, like definition and process/procedure.   Later add a third type, then a fourth, and so on.

(Do Sentence Level Tasks)

*Work with students to identify (and later create) each types of organization at the paragraph level, then move on to identification in short single-type of organization text selections.

(See Paragraphs Level Examples)

*Then, tackle the idea that a text can have an overall type of organization and subordinate types that  support the overall type of organization, just as details support the main idea. (Identify in Seeds of Revolution Aritcle)

Note that the subordinate types are from the same list of types.  Note that they use these types in writing tasks.

*Use textbooks to illustrate the idea of organization and the relationship between organization and purpose.