RMC Health - Tools to Practice for School Health

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Process is the means by which students make sense of new information and skills. Processing helps students filter concepts and skills through their own lenses and life experiences. Establishing appropriate activities for processing is essential to students retaining information and mastering skills. In essence it is the “glue” to instruction.

There are three key elements to an effective processing activity (Tomlinson, 2001):

• Activities must be interesting to the students
• Activities must require students to think and act at high levels
• Activities must focus on enduring understandings

Effective processing activities must include multiple options for how to make sense of key health information or how to practice a skill. Specifically, processing can be differentiated by students’ learning styles, interests, or readiness. Ideally, processing will occur in a number of these realms across a unit. To effectively differentiate processing, a teacher needs to develop a learning profile for each student, and then use that learning profile to group students in different ways throughout a unit of instruction.

Grouping students in different ways (often called flexible grouping) is also important. Grouping strategies are addressed more thoroughly in the Moving Forward section.

Strategy #1 Overview

Learning Profile

A learning profile outlines how a student learns (Tomlinson, 1999).  Learning profiles are developed by assessing how, and under what conditions, students learn best. Many factors influence a person’s learning profile. However, according to Tomlinson (2003), research supports the following four key areas: learning style, intelligence preference, gender, culture. Determining a student’s learning profile helps the teacher create an environment that allows for student differences and sets the stage for differentiation of content, product, and/or process. In the context of process, a learning profile can be used to group students appropriately for activities, as well as to differentiate process options. Students also benefit from learning more about their learning style and intelligence preference. This information not only helps them better understand how they learn, so that they can self-advocate for their learning, but it helps them know which areas they need to strengthen in order to succeed.

Strategy #1 Example

Often, teachers develop learning profiles by collecting key information about their students at the beginning of the year or term. Some of the information, like gender and culture, can be collected from students’ records. To determine students’ learning styles and intelligence preference requires the administration of relevant instruments. To access resources on learning styles and intelligence preference instruments, click here . Once all of the necessary student data are collected, an index card with all of the pertinent information can be developed for each student. Click here for an example of a learning profile card. These cards can then serve as a reminder of the students’ needs, as well as a mechanism for assigning students to groups for certain activities.

Strategy #2 Overview

Graphic Organizers are tools to assist students with the meaning-making part of learning. “Graphic organizers give visual representations of facts/concepts and also they show the relationship between and among new facts and previous information” (Gregory & Chapman, 2002, p. 87). Graphic organizers can be used:

• For brainstorming at the beginning of a unit as a pre-assessment;
• As a map or guide to help with understanding when viewing a video or reading a passage;
• To identify sequences;
• To help students relate new information to prior knowledge;
• To check for understanding;
• To organize note taking and for summarizing thoughts; or
• As a culminating assessment.

Strategy #2 Examples

• A word web is a graphic organizer that helps students “focus on a concept, theme, or topic; identify the secondary categories related to the big idea; and then add all the significant dimensions related to those secondary categories” (Gregory & Chapman, 2002, p. 91). To view an example of a tobacco prevention word web, click here.
• Two other graphic organizers, the Cross-Classification Compare and Contrast Matrix and the Comparing Two Things Flow Chart (Gregory & Chapman, 2002, pp. 88-90) are useful tools to help students process new information by having them compare and contrast items or concepts. The Cross-Classification Matrix requires students to compare several items against specific criteria, whereas the Comparing Two Things Flow Chart requires students to analyze only two items or concepts against each other. To view an example of a tobacco specific matrix and a comparison flow chart, click here.