Teach

Learning syntactic analysis in an easy and fast way

A well-structured mind map accelerated learning

A certain Saturday...

On what was until then a peaceful Saturday afternoon, my son, then a preteen in high school, turned to me and said:

My initial reaction was a feeling that it would not be possible. But, questioning and reflecting that conclusions can be superficial, premature, hasty, I decided to try something, even if it was out of conscience. By the way, if it were today, it would be easier; my thinking could be described as "it doesn't seem possible with the information and options I have so far."

Searching then for what to do, the idea of making a mind map emerged.

I already had good experience in making mind maps of discursive texts. I also had an app, which would make editing and printing easier; In my opinion, paper was the best option for him to use the mind map.

Version 1

I took the textbook (Portuguese) and went through the chapters, selecting the relevant content and putting it on the mind map, following the structure of the book: subject, predicate, verb, direct and indirect objects, classification of sentences and so on, with detailed subtopics. This first version was similar to the one below (the original has not been preserved):

I showed him the mind map while still on the computer, to check if at least I was in the right direction. He didn't even have to speak; his expression revealed to me that there had been no progress.

What could be missing?

Version 2

I then had the insight that, as I said, marked my teaching career as before and after: the probable cause for him not being able to use that content could be as simple as him not knowing what to do.

I went back to the mind map and prepared a second version. I changed the organization of the topics to put together a script, a step-by-step guide that could be followed. I looked for a logical sequence in that content and found steps like:

1. Identify the sentence.
2. Look for the clauses.
3. Analyze each clause.
4. ...

I then created main topics for each step, as in the figure:

As subtopics of each step, I put the necessary knowledge to execute each step and examples. For example, for step 1:

This step was much faster, the fact that the mind map was in an application (and not hand-drawn) made it much easier to reorganize the second version, mostly moving topics with the mouse.

The mind map had become large, so I made a layout by partitioning it into several files, one for each page. See in the figure the master mind map (initial levels) of the script, with some additional levels as it fit in the A4 format (some topics are contracted, that is, their subtopics are not displayed). The icons indicate that there is a mind map that details the topic. As these is not about syntactic analysis, I reproduce below the original mind maps in Portuguese.

The Figure 2 shows a breakdown of step 4, the types of coordinated clauses. I believe that examples are fundamental; Descriptions only, for those who have no experience, may be insufficient and imply a risk of distortion of meaning.

I printed the mind maps and passed them on to him. In a few minutes, he comes back:

And I hadn't even explained the content. Then he told me that he did well in the test. Not bad for something that at first didn't even seem possible.

Analysis

This episode well supports the value of having a mind map of a text. In fact, it is not just about the mind map; A more central aspect is to have a structured visualization of content, which meets our premise that thinking requires visualization of structure; Thinking doesn't work well in "text mode," if it works at all.

But even a structure view may not work. This episode also showed that it is not enough for a learner to know what things mean; he must know what to do to get results from what he learns. Thus, the way the structure view is organized is also important.

You might agree that these guidelines—visualization of structure, proper organization—make a huge difference in how a teacher plans teaching; We apply them a lot in our training.

Offshoot

Finally, a curiosity, a future development of this episode. Years later, I set up an online store for mind map-related products. The syntactic analysis script ended up being one of the store's products, and very convenient, because the body of the work was already ready, only needing a cover and layout.