Every year, there is more information to be taught and less time to teach it. How can students even begin to see the forest through all the trees? One way to help them see the relationships among the pieces of information is to teach them to find those relationships.

To do this, teachers can use the ORDER Routine to teach students to recognize four basic types of relationships (e.g., compare and contrast, problem-solution) and to draw pictures of those relationships. At first, the teacher guides the discussion as students suggest ways to depict the relationships among pieces of information. Later, as students understand the process and become proficient at the higher order thinking skills required, the teacher can turn the process over to the students so that they are either working with each other or independently to depict the information. Since the information in their depictions will represent some of the most important information in the course, students can use their pictures as they study for tests and write essays. This instructor’s manual provides step-by-step instructions on how to introduce this routine to students and transfer use of the process over time to the students.