Hello, my name is Carol Gebhardt, and I was the coordinator of a collaborative project between the Northern Nevada Writing Project and Nevada's Northwest Professional Development Program in 2007. Working as a team of fourteen K-12 Nevada educators, we examined Robert Marzano's research on effectively using comparison and contrast thinking to increase student learning, and we ended up creating a new print guide for teachers and administrators: The Going Deep with Compare and Contrast Thinking Guide, which is now featured and used at all of the NNWP's Writing Across the Curriculum in-service classes.

Below is the introduction I wrote for the guide that introduces my personal philosophy on why comparing and contrasting is a tool we should all further explore as educators:

"I sat in my small reading group listening to my students share their Venn Diagrams about two characters in the story. 'One is a boy and the other is a girl?' one student answered with a pensive look on his face. I wanted to be sarcastic and say, 'No kidding!, but I didn’t. I did feel frustrated that the child was in 6th grade and could not see past gender when finding similarities and differences in character traits. That same afternoon I came to the conclusion my students just did not know how to think deeper when making comparisons, and I knew it was my job to guide their learning. I started looking for inspiration and found it in several different places.

"W.B. Yeats once wrote, 'Education is not the filling of the pail, but the lighting of the fire.' In 1923, Yeats won the Nobel Prize in Literature for writing inspirational poetry in such an artistic form that it was said to inspire the spirit of the whole nation. I guess you could say his poetry set people on fire. I decided that’s what I wanted to do, light the fire for my students. I wanted them to be able to compare and contrast ideas across the curriculum and then write about those comparisons in a thoughtful manner. The Yeats quote inspired me to ask the question, 'How do we light the fire in our students’ thinking? What can we use for matches to ignite this fire?'

"So, I set off to find a few matches to get us started. I became deliberate in my approach to teaching writing. I was no longer just teaching a strategy here and there; I picked strategies based on how well the strategy could make my students think and write.

"A 'match book' used for this guide is Robert Marzano’s book titled Classroom Instruction That Works: Research-Based Strategies for Increasing Student Achievement Marzano and his team gathered studies by other researchers and discovered there were common strategies being used by educators to increase the achievement of students. In his book he shares the research numbers and explains how these strategies can be used correctly to enhance the performance of students. While I consider each one of Marzano’s effective strategies a 'match,' for this guide I will focus on the strategy found in chapter 2, 'Identifying Similarities and Differences.' It exemplifies how an effective strategy can spread across grade levels, and I think that is precisely what makes a strategy effective; it works at any grade level. Working with teachers in the Northern Nevada Writing Project, it has become clear to me that writing is definitely a place where we need effective strategies that work at any grade level because writing is a developmental process.

"Marzano discusses the importance of how the teacher structures identifying similarities and differences. It is not enough to throw a Venn Diagram chart out and say, “Okay, how are these topics the same and different?” Marzano’s four generalizations from the research and theory in 'Identifying Similarities and Differences' include: a) present students with explicit guidance in the identification of similarities and differences, b) ask students to independently identify similarities and differences, c) use graphic forms to enhance understanding, and d) identifying similarities and differences can occur by asking students to compare, classify, and to use the forms of metaphors and analogies.

"The writing process is another set of 'matches' for our students. I have found comparing and contrasting to be highly effective in increasing students’ ability to formulate ideas during the pre-writing stage. Shirley Dickson’s article, 'Integrating Reading and Writing to Teach Compare-Contrast Text Structure: A Research Based Methodology,' reminded me how students need to be presented with text structures to fully understand how to write in the genre form we are asking of them. Having students compare one text structure with another and allowing them to use this as a launching pad for writing is a way to support all of our students in becoming better writers.

"Let’s try to think about lighting the flame, instead of filling the pail."

On this page at WritingFix, we provide lessons, tools, prompts, and resources that were inspired by the Going Deep with Compare and Contrast Thinking Guide.