Think it – Map It!

Book excerpt: Think it — Map it! Is the most relevant, practical and helpful book yet written on mapping techniques in the classroom. By showing you what pupils' thinking looks like, this book gives you the necessary insights to integrate literacy, thinking skills and accelerated learning in your classrooms. Organized into three sections, it explains: • WHY model mapping is so effective • WHEN model mapping can be effectively applied • HOW to effectively learn and teach model mapping. Think it — Map it! Is packed with case studies and maps from schools that have taken the principles and promises of the authors' MapWise training course and their best-selling book by the same name and turned them into winning classroom strategies. The examples clearly show how primary, comprehensive, grammar, nursery and special school teachers have turned theory into practice — often with amazing results. In this book you will discover how these schools have applied mapping to: • literacy • thinking skills • subject explanation • revision • collaborative learning • extending the gifted and talented • including pupils with special needs • formative assessment • displays • teacher planning • staff meetings • development planning... ... and very much more. What 'MapWise' schools have realized is that whenever thinking is involved, then model mapping is an appropriate and effective tool to use. This book moves schools on from the restricting way in which model mapping is often perceived and gives a clear overview of the reasons why this visual tool works so effectively for all types of learner — and teachers too. Written in a clear and lively style, Think it — Map it! is sure to become the classic text on mapping in schools. With bite-size chapters and with a vast array of wonderful maps produced by children, this book will excite and educate all staff currently working in schools. '... we cannot navigate physically or intellectually without a map... So the learner needs a map that will always let him or her find their way to what they already know and enables them to navigate from there to their desired destination. This book is fundamentally about how learning works and how teaching can be transformed when it grasps and respects some cardinal principles — about facts and knowledge, about memory and retrieval, about language and thinking, about individual and social learning. This book sheds new light on some deep truths about peer learning, about talking your way to meaning, about learning as liberation from a ruthlessly lockstep progression through the curriculum. It is a salutary reminder in an age of attainments targets, SATS, key stages and value added that learning is what schools are for and it is what makes teachers want to teach. This book is a real treasure trove of good ideas and sound pedagogic principles.' Professor John MacBeath, Chair of Educational Leadership, University of Cambridge