Picture this Reflection

I have always wanted to know more about what other educational professionals thought about graphic organizers. I personally have mixed feelings about using graphic organizers because for myself I learn things better in a linear fashion, so graphic organizers like concept maps has always thrown me off. When I was in school I always felt like teachers would have us feel out graphic organizers as busy work and not really explain the importance of each section on the organizers. After making my graphic organizer I never used / studied it because I always felt like it was hard to follow or not enough room to right down important information. Like Fisher and Fry stated in the chapter "If the purpose of a graphic organizer becomes filling it out correctly, it is nothing more than a worksheet." That is simply how it was for me in my early education, nothing but busy work. Now that I am a teacher I have had several teachers have different influences on me about using graphic organizers. Some experiences were beneficial but some were not. In my future teaching opportunities I want to use graphic organizers but I want them to be beneficial to my students. How can I ensure that each of my students benefits from using these and not have a bad experience like I did during my grade schooling years? Maybe my teachers did not use the right kind of concept map based on the subject and topic being taught. How do I know which graphic organizers is appropriate for which subject, grade level, and lesson? 


Last week as I was in my 2nd grade clinical class and we made a graphic organizer based off a story we had just read. At least 5 of my students did not understand how to organize their data onto the graph because it was so busy and unclear of directions. It seemed to me that the students did not understand how to use different types of graphic organizers, so maybe an assortment of styles should be taught at an early age to prevent this problem in the future. Or maybe the teacher did not select the best graphic organizer for this assignment because it is important that teachers select an appropriate graphic organizer based on the lesson or assignment.