Organizers: Frames, Clusters, And Stems

Are the order of these approaches concrete or flexible?

Overall, I believe that the chapter was concise and pedagogically informative. However,  I'm still having some trouble prioritizing some of the details that I absorbed from the reading. I am confused about the hierarchy at which students or educators would apply these approaches recommended when instructing children with special needs (exceptional students). The article is written to address the ideal classroom learning situations, but not an overcrowded classroom; which aren't a part of smaller learning communities. I'm curious about how these awesome strategies would work in real time classroom situations with tweaked or differentiated for each child.

Although the strategies are listed in a certain order, I believe that identifying key words first, then formulating essential questions are important to finding out what the main idea of a reading is (Benjamin, 2005). The "key words," that are initially highlighted by children may or may not be the key words towards figuring out the main idea of a reading passage. Therefore, a situation is created whereas essential questioning becomes a natural product of an emerging understanding of the writing task. I would recommend an informal pre-writing assignment if the writing task is based on a new concept.

In a previous chapter, Benjamin discussed the idea of the writing expectations of general education teachers versus educators for certain disciplines.  It wouldn't matter what our expectations are if children are unsure how to distinguish the difference between the proper response to a lab report bullet point and a research paper. Further more, the response to a document base question on the History Regents, may not stress essential questioning because the document is already asking a direct question. It may require comparisons first or chronologically recording information in an objective tone. Ultimately, how do we get students do figure the order that the approaches mentioned by Benjamin would work for them?