Graphic organisers are thinking tools to help students generate, organise, explore, order or connect ideas. They make students’ thinking visible and can be used as a formative assessment tool to identify students' prior knowledge and current understanding.

They also provide differentiated support by helping to focus and guide student thinking and prepare for classroom discussion.

Graphic organisers also allow multiple entry points for students to explore, extend and deepen their thinking and engagement with ideas, issues or concepts.

Graphic organisers can be used as a pre-test to identify prior knowledge from which teachers can develop additional areas of focus or questioning to move students thinking and knowledge forward from where they already are.

When used as a pre and post test, graphic organisers can help identify student learning growth, as well as creating opportunities to capture evidence of their skills and knowledge.

They can also be used as a 'knowledge map' to which students make additions as they explore a unit of learning.

Graphic organisers provide differentiated opportunities for students to record evidence of their thinking, knowledge and skills because there are no constraints in what students include, which creates opportunities for more detailed documentation of student thinking and the organisers often encourage higher-order thinking.

Graphic organisers provide opportunities for students to document thinking in dot points, words, phrases, or drawings which supports low literacy and EAL students to evidence their understanding.

They also teach students different ways of thinking and show them strategies they can use for organising ideas, generating connections and thinking through problems.

Students may need multiple exposures to these tools to become familiar with them, and appreciate their value. It also helps to keep it simple. Identify two or three graphic organisers that are most useful for the thinking and skills you are developing.

Explain the purpose of using the graphic organiser to students. Clarify if you are using it as a tool to help them generate, organise, explore, order or connect ideas. Or, to capture their prior knowledge and assess what they have learned over the course of a lesson, sequence of classes, or a unit

How you use the graphic organisers will depend on your purpose and which ones make sense to you.

You may also develop your own templates to re-use as part of your learning routines.

Graphic organisers can diversify the learning products students create to evidence their learning, they also diversify the process of learning.