The ‘Frayer mannequin‘ is a long-standing graphic organiser that has been deployed in lecture rooms with success for many years (it was first conceived Dorothy Frayer and her colleagues on the College of Wisconsin). It’s a easy however efficient mannequin to assist college students to organise their understanding of a brand new tutorial time period or advanced vocabulary selection.
The normal mannequin is as follows:
I’ve been utilizing the ‘Frayer mannequin’ for round two years now in my English classes. It has confirmed a helpful mannequin to assist me explicitly focus my instructing of vital literary phrases in English. Final 12 months, I undertook a ‘disciplined inquiry’ on my apply to discover if it proved an efficient technique to train advanced vocabulary within the GCSE poetry I used to be instructing.
I made a decision to adapt the everyday ‘Frayer Mannequin’ to make it extra acceptable to literature research (the pliability and ease of this graphic organiser is why it proves so useable). Right here, a pupil selects the phrase “chartered” from William Blake’s poem, ‘London’, utilizing our tailored headings:
Right here is an extract from the resultant shut evaluation of the poem, revealing the coed’s use of their ‘Frayer mannequin’ (with some peer suggestions):
Does the ‘Frayer mannequin’ alone rework understanding of phrases? Properly, no – not likely. Nonetheless, I discovered it a fast and helpful technique to explicitly carefully analyse vital vocabulary decisions in English. In subsequent questionnaire suggestions, quite a few college students commented that the mannequin was useful in getting them to recognise a very powerful ‘keystone’ phrases and concepts to analyse.
The ‘Frayer Mannequin’ in Science
Over the past 12 months at Huntington college we now have had a deal with assist our college students entry the tougher studying and tutorial vocabulary calls for of the brand new curriculum. We have now centered on some generic methods, just like the ‘Frayer mannequin’ and related graphic organisers, however crucially, these have been utilized in our secondary college topic disciplines.
Alister Talbot, considered one of our Science academics, has been inquiring about utilizing the ‘Frayer mannequin’ as device in his Key Stage 3 Science classes:
“I’ve been utilizing the ‘Frayer mannequin’ in my 12 months 8 science classes to discover key lesson vocabulary in additional element. I’ve used it to baseline my college students – asking them what they already know concerning the phrase and the place they’ve used it beforehand (science setting or non-science setting). We’ve then moved onto exploring within the phrase in a bit extra element – wanting on the etymology of the phrase and in addition the morphology.
For instance, the important thing phrase ‘sub-atomic’ we explored what ‘sub’ meant and different phrases which comprise ‘sub’. After exploring the phrase extra, I’ve used the ‘Frayer mannequin’ to get the scholars to put in writing some definitive notes on the phrase – both the important thing definition or a diagram referring to the specification. Lastly, I’ve inspired college students to make use of the phrase – both in utilizing the important thing phrase in response to an examination query/writing their very own rationalization of an idea utilizing the important thing phrase.
My 12 months 8 college students appear to have very a lot loved utilizing the Frayer mannequin – they’ve particularly loved discussing the place they’ve come throughout the phrase beforehand and the number of out-of-classroom-contexts which they’ve give you have been nice. They college students additionally take pleasure in studying concerning the morphology and etymology of the phrase – though this does take time throughout the classes and within the nice scheme of making ready for examination I (certainly, a few of my college students have questioned this). Of specific curiosity has been observing how pupils have used the phrase after being taught the content material of the lesson and the way they’ve answered examination questions – many have written explanations with an actual grasp of the true that means of the phrase, not only a superficial overview.”
You’ll be able to see an instance from Alister’s instructing right here:
You’ll be able to see that Alister (and his college students!) ask legitimate questions concerning the ‘why’ and ‘when’ of utilizing the ‘Frayer mannequin’, not simply ‘what’s it?’ On a topic degree, these sort of questions are precisely what we must be asking. Some researchers have critiqued the time-intensive nature of the method. We must always after all clarify our strategies to our college students too when attainable. As tutorial literacy proves such a problem for our college students in Science, maybe with out them realising it, you will need to query how we greatest talk the important language of our topic domains.
Consistent with the pliability of the ‘Frayer mannequin’ throughout the curriculum, analysis has been undertaken on the effectiveness of the Frayer mannequin for arithmetic instructing, in addition to a normal technique for buying and deepening vocabulary data. It may be utilized by academics to explicitly train key vocabulary, show a immediate for dialogue, or utilized by college students to document their phrase data with larger depth than is typical.
The ‘Frayer mannequin’ is now firmly lodged into my trainer toolkit. And that isn’t simply because ‘Frayer’ is a homophone reminder of my beautiful daughter ‘Freya’!