To illustrate the power in what Ausubel was advocating, Joyce and Weil give the example of an art museum docent seeking to help her visitors to learn something from the large number of paintings and sculptures they would see on her tour (265-266). In the first gallery, she introduces them to a powerful concept from art history: that art, though it is always personal, reflects the culture and times in which it was made. The social circumstances in which art is produced influence the artists’ technique, subject matter, colors, and style. She asks them to think about the drawings they may have made in elementary school and how they differed as they grew up; so too, as a culture changes, does the art people make within it alter. Pointing to a few examples, she illustrates these ideas by noting how certain elements in the art reflect social ideas and changes in them. Then, as they go through subsequent galleries, she points to the factors in the paintings, sculptures, and assemblages that alter with and reflect changes in culture. As a result, what would have been just a jumble of images is organized into a small set of powerful ideas that makes it possible to walk out of the gallery knowing and remembering some of them.

In this example, the museum guide makes a massive amount of visual information meaningful by focusing on a small set of powerful concepts from art history. She connects those ideas to previous learner experiences (their own drawings), and then reminds the patrons of the ideas repeatedly throughout the tour. The process is neither passive nor is it a pure lecture. Learners can ask questions, interact with each other and the guide, and apply the ideas on their own to various art works that the guide does not explain. The point is that the advance organizer helps the museum tourists see the art more clearly and therefore more meaningfully. The key is not the method of presentation (which could be lecture, video, reading, a web site), but the organization of the material.

Implications
Ausubel uses two principles to organize curriculum and instruction: progressive differentiation and integrative reconciliation. Though they may seem intimidating, the principles are simple. Progressive differentiation means that content should be organized and presented beginning with the most general ideas and concepts and then gradually increasing detail and specificity. Integrative reconciliation requires that new ideas be related to previously learned information. The museum guide follows these principles: she starts with very general but powerful ideas connecting culture and art, relates them to previous experience, then points to specific examples throughout the museum tour.

As Ausubel points out, one of the real problems for teachers is that most textbooks and other teaching materials are not organized progressively. Each topic is, instead, given a separate section of the text and treated at about the same level of abstraction. Seldom, if ever, does the learner get to see the overall structure of the subject matter under study in a way that is related to his/her previous experience.

Advance organizers provide the necessary scaffolding for students to either learn new and unfamiliar material (an expository organizer which provides the basic concept at the highest level of generalization) or to integrate new ideas into relatively familiar ideas (a comparative organizer which compares and contrasts old and new ideas). Ausubel contends that these organizing ideas, which may be single concepts or statements of relationship, are themselves important content and should be taught because they serve to organize everything that follows. Advance organizers are based on major concepts, generalizations, principles, and laws of academic disciplines.

Misconception alert: Lists of topics to be covered are sometimes referred to as “advance organizers.” This usage is incorrect unless the topics are major ideas for integrating the information to follow. If the list is just a table of topics to be covered sequentially, it is not really an advance organizer. Compare, for example, the University of Texas Best Practices Advance Organizer example of Women of the Romantic Period to the opening slide of a lecture from the University of Oregon on Identifying Behavioral Disorders. To be fair, there is much more going on in the latter lecture than the opening slide suggests, but the slide does not suggest the powerful organizing ideas that Ausubel advocates.

An extended example
Suppose that a teacher wants to develop factual information about the different culture groups in a particular region or at a particular time. Students will need to be acquainted with the concept of culture before they can gather and organize the information about those groups in any meaningful way. Borrowing from anthropology, she presents the concept of culture through a visual:

She then proceeds to use the students’ own experiences as the illustrative examples for developing each of the ideas upon which she wants to focus. Once students seem to have clarified these ideas, she then sends to learning materials (text, video, other resources) about particular culture groups to gather information organized around those ideas. They record them through a retrieval chart (this chart can also be used as an assessment measure):

Characteristics	Culture group 1	Culture group 2 (and so on)
Social rules
Religious beliefs
Tools and artifacts
Language
Values and attitudes

After students try to gather the information, they and the teacher can ask questions to clarify ideas, add new cultural characteristics from information they found that does not fit the categories, make comparisons across groups, and apply them to new groups. Alternatively, the teacher could present information about a couple of example groups to develop the ideas further. In either case, the students now have an overall picture of culture that can help them organize information about new groups as they encounter them.

The basic procedure (Joyce and Weil, pp. 273-278)

Phase One: Presentation of Advance Organizer

• Clarify aims of the lesson
  
• Present organizer:
  • Identify defining attributes.
  • Give examples or illustrations where appropriate.
  • Provide context.
  • Repeat.
  • Prompt awareness of learner’s relevant knowledge and experience.

Phase Two: Presentation of Learning Task or Material

• Present material.
• Make logical order of learning material explicit.
• Link material to organizer.

Phase Three: Strengthening Cognitive Organization

• Use principles of integrative reconciliation.
• Elicit critical approach to subject matter.
• Clarify ideas.
• Apply ideas actively (such as by testing them).

Additional issues: While this model requires a highly structured social environment, it also needs active collaboration between teacher and learner. It also needs to be supported with data-rich, well-organized material (Note: textbooks typically do not organize information conceptually).