Organising information is a discrete skill that needs to be explicitly taught. And, it is truly where the magic happens. I’ve had students who prefer organising over the other two. Of course, you can’t organise without information, so they accept that gathering is a necessary evil.

We could spend an entire school year with our students and do nothing more than gather information. What would we have at the end of it? Pages and pages of … not much.

Making sense of our world is something we do daily. As adults, teachers specifically, we not only make sense of our world, we unwrap the world so our students can get a handle on it.

Gather, organise, and communicate. As a process, we use it more than we realise. And we use it without thinking about it. Think weekly shopping–gather a list of items needed at the supermarket.

We humans are great at telling stories. We’ve told each other stories for as long as we’ve had language. Even before that–think of cave drawings and paintings.