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KWL Charts
A common, and easy-to-implement approach to organizing and communicating learning.

In a KWL chart, a student or group of students makes three lists of things:

1. What it is that they already KNOW about a subject

2. What it is that they WANT TO KNOW about a subject

3. What they LEARNED about a subject.

One common method for creating a KWL chart is to have the student or students fold a paper into three sections. They write a list in each section. First they do their research and dicuss what it is that they want to learn through an activity (the teacher can interact in the guidance of this development of a contextual framework). Then they perform their activity, collecting their data and recording their observations. Finally, they re-visit their original expectations, and process their understanding of what they found out.

In the animated variation of a KWL chart shown above, a digital camera was used to photograph a series of chart-paper diagrams of a terrarium activity. Then the images were assembled into an animation, suitable for presenting in PowerPoint, or over the web. In the original presentation, our subject, Lia, had designed her presentation to be displayed in a "flip-chart" manner. This is a great method for supporting student presentations in an elementary school classroom -- whether or not the teacher uses the high-tech or the low-tech method.