As a teacher, it is vital for you to make sure that your students are given proper assistance in understanding the information that you are having them learn. The reason for this is that students must be able to effectively study, process, and retain the information that you are teaching. One way of achieving this goal is by providing them with organizational tools to help them.

According to the University of Memphis Department of Psychology, organization can include outlining, integrating, and synthesizing information. This will promote better learning than more passive learning strategies like reading the material. By helping them to organize the information, you will be actively engaging them with their material, which will produce a higher likelihood of long-term retention.

In a research based text titled How People Learn by J. D. Bransford, A.L. Brown, and R.R. Cocking, curricula should be organized in ways that lead to conceptual understanding. Students need to be given a chance to organize knowledge meaningfully. When presented with information in an organizational manner, studies have shown that students perform better than if the information is not presented organizationally. In addition, they state that, helping students to organize their knowledge is as important as the knowledge itself, since knowledge organization is likely to affect students' intellectual performance” (How people learn).

Organized Instruction for the Improvement of Word Knowledge Skills by Francis T. Durso and Kathy A. Coggins supports these claims, saying that outlining is helpful as a study aid and that organizing information makes it much easier to remember than material that is poorly organized. In fact, in order for effective information processing to occur, it is best for the students to be able to make connections, make it personally meaningful, and be able to organize the information. In addition, the majority of methods used for organizing information for students are visual, which the brain has been showed to respond better to than simply verbal instruction. By using the following suggested strategies in your classroom, you should be able to promote better information retention among your students and increase their levels of understanding.

Given this research and information, we will now discuss three different methods that could be used for organizing knowledge in the classroom. We will look at 5 specific strategies that use these methods.

There are several approaches that teachers can use to organize their instruction. We will focus on three of these approaches to distinguish between the different kinds of teaching strategies. The first involves teacher-generated organization This is where the instructor directly provides organization for the students to aid the teacher’s lesson. The second is student generated organization, where students are given the task of creating their own form of organization. The third strategy involves teacher-guided, student generated organization. This is where teachers are involved in the organization, but students have more freedom to generate and organize their own work. 

Follow the thinks below to take a closer look at each of these approaches and some specific strategies for each of them: