The Framing Routine

Resources:

The Framing Routine Research (pdf)

The Story Behind the Framing Routine from author Ed Ellis:
The roots of the Framing Routine derived from my experiences during my doctoral studies. I was one of the high school teachers of students with LD who were conducting studies sponsored by the University of Kansas Institute for Research on Learning Disabilities (KU-IRLD) to validate instruction for specific learning strategies. One of these studies involved teaching and validating a writing strategy, the Theme Writing Strategy (known as “TOWER”), designed by Jean Schumaker. Use of the strategy included a prewriting activity that involved recording and prioritizing ideas on a hierarchical graphic organizer. This graphic organizer provided the foundation upon which the “Frame” subsequently evolved. At the time, however, it was solely viewed as a writing tool.

A few years later, Jan Bulgren developed one of the first KU-IRLD interventions that focused on strategic approaches to content instruction. It involved use of a graphic organizer she designed as a tool for teaching abstract concepts (this intervention eventually evolved into the Concept Mastery Routine). Although I found her work very interesting, my interest at the time was in teaching learning strategies, not teaching content.

Two catalysts subsequently changed my whole way of thinking about graphic organizers. First, while co-authoring the curriculum for CEC’s Academy for Effective Instruction, Anita Archer shared her research with me on using graphic organizers depicting different ways of organizing information to teach content-area subjects. The simplicity of the techniques and their impact as tools to help students learn content-area information was an epiphany for me. At about the same time, Mike Pressley, a cognitive psychology researcher, and I were frequently co-presenters at conferences; many late night discussions and his articles profoundly affected my thinking about strategic instruction and its theoretical and empirical basis. In particular, his work helped me recognize the importance of an embedded curriculum associated with teaching information processing and fostering use of cognitive elaboration strategies when using graphic organizers in the classroom. Of the hundreds of papers Mike published, Elaborating to Learn and Learning to Elaborate (CITE) was one of the most influential for me. I began to revisit Jan Bulgren’s work and the “TOWER” graphic organizer with a whole new perspective.

My thinking about graphic organizers was also strongly influenced by my on-going experiences as a college professor, doing volunteer work, and conducting studies in secondary classrooms. A considerable amount of this work involved experimenting with various graphic organizers in a range of teaching and learning contexts. All of this eventually led to developing ways to use graphic organizers as “Think ahead” techniques for use at the beginning of a lesson to activate knowledge and stimulate interest, “Think During” techniques for use during the lesson to maximize student elaboration of the to-be-learned material, and “Think-back” techniques for use at the end of a lesson to facilitate reflective review of the material. It also included a range of ways to use graphic organizers to teach reading, writing, and learning strategies. Over the years, I experimented with many graphic organizers, including a range of modifications of the “TOWER” graphic organizer and contexts for using it. The graphic organizer eventually evolved into the “Frame” that is used in conjunction with the Framing Routine. One of my goals for the Framing Routine instructor’s manual was to show teachers how the same basic graphic organizer can be used for a range of different purposes; thus, instructions for using the Frame along with Think-Ahead, Think-During, and Think-Back instructional tactics appear in the manual.

Author's thoughts about Content Enhancement Instruction and the Framing Routine:
When I read Lenz and Bulgren’s first piece introducing the concept of Content Enhancement (CE), I was intrigued, mostly by what seemed to be a new dimension that these researchers were integrating into strategic instruction. I didn’t fully appreciate the elegant simplicity underlying the notion of enhancing content because the article was what one might characterize as a “heavy read,” steeped in theoretical notions and complex analysis of related research. The more I worked with CE materials, however, the more I’ve come to realize what a simple, yet incredibly powerful notion CE represents. Two CE principles are paramount: (a) increasing the learnability of subject-matter is preferable to dumbing it down, and (b) extraordinary teaching that impacts all students should be implemented before taking extraordinary measures such as providing individual accommodations. CE puts the role of accommodations in its proper place –they should be used as a last resort, rather than the first option. Historically, education has been steeped in the notion that failure to learn is the student’s fault (e.g., the result of a learning disability, poor motivation, etc.). CE redefines failure to learn by adhering to the radical notion that failure to learn is first and foremost a teaching problem, not a student problem.

One of the positive trends resulting from the No Child Left Behind legislation has been the focus on scientifically validated interventions, that is those educational practices that have been empirically validated using scientific experimental research methodologies. What is often missing from research reports about the effectiveness of new techniques is information regarding their social validity. In other words, the new practice or procedure may be validated as effective because student achievement improves when it is used, but that does not mean it will be used in the “real world” of everyday classrooms. The new technique may not have social validity because it may be too difficult to learn to use, too time consuming to apply, require too much advance planning, students may not like it, and/or it may require teachers to make radical adjustments in their own teaching philosophy to accommodate its use. Fortunately, the Framing Routine seems to have clearly met the “reality” test. I’ve received a lot of emails from teachers and parents expressing appreciation. It’s difficult to be modest and proud at the same time, but I admit it. I’m very proud of the impact this routine has had. It continues to touch the lives of a great many students.

Teacher and Student Feedback on the Framing Routine:
I am very optimistic about the extent to which teachers at all levels of schooling are now using graphic organizers, and in particular, the Frame. It is one of those tools that can be integrated across subject areas so that students can learn to use it in very flexible ways to be more successful in a variety of contexts. For example, in one middle school, I observed a social studies teacher using the Frame during a guided note-taking activity and another social studies teacher using it during a “jig-saw” cooperative-learning text-chapter reading activity. In another wing of the building, 8th-grade students were using the Frame to record observations during experiments. At the same time, 8th-grade language arts teachers were using it in full-inclusion classes. The more sophisticated writers were using it to plan their persuasive essays, while at the same time, students with developmental disabilities were using the same tool while learning to write simple paragraphs. Teachers and students have sent me thousands of examples of how they have used the Frame. Applications range from kindergarten classes, where students have drawn and colored pictures depicting a story sequence to medical school, where students have used the Frame to organize information in preparation for their Medical Board Examinations.