T.Y.B.O.T. Tuesday is a regular feature, highlighting a practically useful teaching strategy that you can implement tomorrow. Any and all suggestions are welcome. T.Y.B.O.T. appears on the last Tuesday of each month.

THE STRATEGY: Schematic Chart

Necessities: Nothing really

Options: Some sort of prize (if you decide to make it a competition)

The Pitch: This strategy provides a useful organizer of information for your students, while modeling good learning practice and providing the instructor with some insight as to how students are thinking about and organizing key concepts (and categories). The strategy is particularly helpful if there is some sort of comparison or new iteration of a concept that would allow for a comparative charting on a table.

The Plan: I like to break students up into groups for this, but it can be done in pairs or by individuals to equal success. I draw a table on the board with blanks for organizing categories (usually 4 to 6 columns worth). Typically, I fill in the left hand column (as an example, in my Political Philosophy class, I did this last week as we moved into discussing our second version of Liberalist theory. In the left column, I wrote “Theory” in the first row, “Utilitarianism” below that in the second row, and “Libertarianism” below that in the third row), and I leave the rest of the column headers blank. You can leave the whole thing blank or fill in the major categories or any other iterations. In my version, I leave the categories across the top blank and ask the groups to fill them in with the ideas and concepts that will help them best understand the theory (or whatever) under consideration.

If it’s a competition, I have them post their charts on the board and we vote (or I decide). If it’s not a competition, then I debrief the class ideas (usually they hit on most of what I would say are the key categories), and add any suggestions that I may have. Students then work to fill in their chart over the rest of the class. (So, for example, on the charts my Political Philosophy came up with, the four that came up most frequently were Moral Standard, Role of Government, Status of Individual, and Definition of Justice. One that I thought they should have but that didn’t make the board was “Common Objections.” Students then had a table that looked like this:

And then they had a chart, of their own making, that organized the material we just covered in a fashion that made it easy to review and compare, while serving as a pre-organizer for upcoming readings. Win-win. And the best part is that the basic idea could apply to anything conceptual–the whole chart could have been about Utilitarianism (one row for Bentham’s version, one for Mill) or the first column could have listed thinkers. It could also be used for different periods (e.g., Baroque, Classical, Romantic, etc.) or disciplines (e.g., Anthropology, Psychology, Sociology) or identities (e.g., Cuban, Brazilian, Haitian, etc.).

It is interesting to see students work (and struggle) to categorize their knowledge, but it is also a powerful experience to see them see that they have the power (and responsibility) to organize their own knowledge and watch them go about doing it. Give it a try, and if you do, let us know how it goes.