Planning and Advance organizers

Planning and Advance organizers

Planning

It takes effective teaching and the use of appropriate strategies to ensure maximum equipment of knowledge and skills into the learner. However, to be able to select effective and appropriate methods, the processes employed by learners have to be comprehended so as to incorporate methods that boost these processes. Underpinning on this, this report is going to explicate planning in writing.

Objectives of Planning

By the end of the end, the instructional designers should be able to

• Define the concept of planning
• Establish when to apply planning
• Explore why planning is used
• Explicate how to utilize planning
• Establish where planning should be used

Generate material that has employed the usage of planning

What is planning is

“Planning is a major process in writing” (Planning, 128) and it entails generating information from memory. Information generated from memory is evaluated with reference to the writing criteria. This is referred to as goal setting.  The information is then planned into a writing plan through a process called organizing (Planning).

When to Select and Use Planning

It has been established that planning takes place during the writing process thus local planning rather than prior to writing, global planning. This means that writers rarely engage in planning prior to commencement of writing. Accordingly, when writing, learners pause from time to time to plan for their writing process. Through the pauses, learners are able to organize information mentally and use the information in the appropriate context (Planning). There is a difference in wring with respect to age in that “young children rely on external memory (i.e., self-dictation) in order to keep the next few words in their short memory” (Planning, p.130). On the contrary, older learners vocalize when writing on rare cases. However, they vocalize when during pauses. In the same context, younger children employ the usage of their external memory. However, older learners tend to have memory load of several words hence do not require the utilization of external memory (Khataybeh & Ateeg, 2011).

Why it should be selected

Planning is effective and important since it allows the writers and the learners to organize, evaluate and generate ideas prior to engaging in the writing process. Additionally, through taking time to plan for the writing process, global planning is enabled. Planning is time and consuming and takes up most of the time when writing (Planning). However, if learners fail to plan, it means that they do not generate ideas from memory, evaluate and assess the ideas and determining their relevance in relation to the writing goals or organize the ideas before writing.  Even so, most learners are not able to benefit from planning because

A major finding of the research on planning is that students often fail to engage in global planning; in other words, they fail to generate ideas, evaluate those ideas for the relevance to the writing goals, and organize the relevant information before writing. If writers do not engage in these prewriting activities, they may have to generate, evaluate, and organize at the same time that they are engaged in translating. (Planning, p.131)

This will make both processes suffer leading to poor and low quality services.  Accordingly, planning is important since it gives direction to the flow of ideas and the integration of the ideas in the writing planning (Whitaker, 2009).

How it should be utilized

Planning can be executed through ensuring that learners list all relevant ideas of a topic before writing. The learners should also search on the topic and generate more information. They should then ick information and ideas that they think are relevant to the topic through focusing on their audience and goals for writing. They should then organize the information and ideas into a coherent structure prior to the writing process. This structure should be a guide to writing (Hartley, 2008). For instance, when learners have to write about the use of technology in their liver, prior to writing, the learners are supposed first list the types of technologies they interact with. They are then supposed to list activities they perform with these technologies, the effectiveness and advantages of the technologies and the disadvantages. From her, students are supposed to explore other sources so as to expand their information. All the findings from literature have to be noted. Have gathered relevant information; the learners should be guided on how to come up with a structure while considering the goals and the audience.

Assessment

Having read through the guideline above, respond to the two questions below

• In your own words, what is planning?
• Why would you encourage your learners to plan?
• What are the advantages of using planning?
• Planning is done during the writing process (True/False)
• Planning is effective when dealing with new topics (True/False)

Related Research

In a study, two groups were involved. In one group, learners were not allowed to engage in any prewriting activity. Thus, they were unable to generate ideas, assess and determine their usage in the writing process (Planning). On the other hand, another group was told to list down possible ideas and topics and to generate an outline prior to the writing process. Accordingly, this group was asked to list relevant ideas in a hierarchical structure forming an outlining group. This was done to activate the planning sub processes of generating, evaluation and organization. It was ascertained that the groups that did not engage in any prewriting activities produced low quality essays while the group that engage in global planning producer high quality services (Whitaker, 2009).

With reference to Hartley (2008), learners who do not engage in prewriting and generating have to execute both planning and translating process concurrently. Due to the constraints on the quantity of how much can be processed in the brain; the quality of writing is affected. On the other hand, for learners who execute prewriting prior to the commencement of writing, when engaging in the writing process, the memory resources are mostly used for the translating process. Therefore, if learners are taught about productive planning before writing, they can be able to produce works of high quality (Whitaker, 2009). Learners are also able to write better is they are given a detailed outline of what they are supposed to do at each step rather than being given a general goal of their writing task. Thus they should be provides with the general goal and sub-goals under it to lead learners through a step by step writing. However, even when such a detailed plan is provided, the learners have to be taught on how they can implement it so as a greatly benefit (Bucholz & Sheffler, 2009). Accordingly, firstly, learners also have to be taught on how the can retrieve information. This has to be accompanied by teaching the learner to search for the required information from relevant sources and notes. Through research, learners are able to familiarize with the topic. In accordance with Whitaker (2009), learners are able to write better on topics they are familiar with than those they are unfamiliar. Secondly, learners are supposed to be able to set goals and evaluate whether the generated ideas align with the goals. This should include writing to address a particular audience and for a specific purpose. Thirdly, the learners have to learn about organizing their ideas into a coherent structure. This has to encompass the creating and monitoring of outlines (Planning).

Conclusion

Planning is a vital process in writing. Therefore, learners have to be taught about aspects of planning to help them organize their thoughts and ideas in a coherent manner. With this, they are able to produce works of high quality.

Reference

Bucholz, J., & Sheffler, J. (2009). Creating a Warm and Inclusive Classroom Environment: Planning for All Children to Feel Welcome. Electronic Journal for Inclusive Education, 2(4), 1-14.

Hartley, J. (2008). Academic Writing and Publishing: A Practical Handbook. Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.

Khataybeh, A., & Ateeg, N. (2011). How “Writing Academic English” Follows Bruner’s Spiral Model in Curriculum Planning. Journal of Emerging Trends in Academic Research and Policy Studies, 2(2), 127-38.

Planning, Section 1 Learning. Chapter 4 Learning to Write, pp.128-33.

Whitaker, A. (2009). Academic Writing Guide. Bratislava, Slovakia: City University of Seattle.