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Edutopia
3 Ways to Boost Students’ Conceptual Thinking
Coaching students to think in terms of concepts helps them understand how to apply their learning in the future.
By Carla Marschall
September 10, 2019
We want our students’ learning to be enduring, enabling them to make
sense of complexity now and in the future. For this to occur, we need
to nudge students beyond the learning of facts and skills to uncover
concepts—transferable ideas that transcend time, place, and situation.
Learning knowledge and skills is like standing in the middle of a
forest, surrounded by trees: It’s easy to spot details but hard to see
patterns. For students to think conceptually, they need opportunities
to head up to the mountaintop, pause, and take in the entire forest.
They need the chance to search for big ideas—to generalize, summarize,
and draw conclusions by looking at their learning in a holistic way.
By intentionally designing learning activities in which students move
between the factual and conceptual levels of thinking, we can help them
construct understanding, facilitate transfer, and build their sense of
agency.
QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER DURING LESSON PLANNING
To help students go from surface to deep learning, we can ask ourselves three questions:
From the facts or skills being taught, which concepts are at the heart
of the learning? For instance, a unit on the human body may be driven
by the concepts of system, interdependence, and health.
Which connections between concepts would we like students to make as a
result of the learning? For example, in mathematics, we may ask
students to connect the concepts of multiplication and division. In
science, we may wish to see how they draw links between photosynthesis
and energy transformation.
What opportunities for application and transfer can we design to help
students take their learning further? For instance, we may ask students
who have learned about principles of art and design to create posters
for a social or environmental cause of their choice.
These questions reflect different levels of conceptual thinking. If
students do not have a strong understanding of individual concepts,
they’ll struggle to see patterns and make connections between them.
Likewise, if we don’t give students time to construct understanding, it
will be challenging for them to apply their ideas to projects, current
events, or other new contexts.
3 WAYS TO PROMOTE CONCEPTUAL THINKING
1. Using categorizing, naming, and sorting activities: In order to
understand individual concepts, students need to grapple with examples,
non-examples, and attributes of a concept. We can ask students, “What
is it like?” and invite them to describe the key features.
For instance, young children learning about habitats may be shown
images of a beehive, pond, log, fish tank, rabbit hutch, and zoo
enclosure and prompted to describe how these homes are similar or
different. By comparing these examples and non-examples of the concept
habitat, students come to understand that a habitat is the natural
environment in which an animal’s needs are met.
By asking students to engage in categorizing, naming, and sorting
activities, we prepare them for more-complex thinking to come later in
a unit and reduce misconceptions.
Concept formation activities:
Create a T-chart labeled Yes and No and ask students to sort examples and non-examples of a concept, such as a polygon.
Provide students with examples of a concept and invite them to find
common attributes and write their own definitions using a stem, such
as, “Migration is when _____.”
Share a concept and ask students to generate their own examples or
non-examples. These can be represented in words or pictures. In the
image below, Grade 1 student illustrations show the concept of a
performer; the students collaboratively analyzed the images to come up
with attributes like being in front of an audience.
2. Asking students to make connections: As students engage with a unit,
they explore a variety of contexts that illustrate concepts in action.
In a unit on the civil rights movement, for example, students may learn
about the Montgomery bus boycott and the Greensboro sit-ins. By drawing
out connections between concepts such as protest and rights, students
can zoom out to see the big picture of their learning.
To support generalizing, we can design activities that require students
to link concepts. For instance, students in my Grade 7 social studies
class engaged in concept mapping at the end of a unit on
sustainability. They mapped out concepts hierarchically, then created
connections using linking words to describe relationships between them.
I asked them to chart out their main understandings as statements next
to their concept map. It’s important when facilitating such activities
to ensure that students support their thinking using evidence from
prior learning.
Concept linking activities:
Invite students to take the role of a specific concept explored in a
unit, and ask them to sit in a circle of four or five people, each
representing a different concept. They then make connections to each
other, explaining how and why they connect using evidence from prior
learning.
Use graphic organizers that ask students to collaboratively synthesize
multiple case studies. For instance, have students read about Malala
Yousafzai, Martin Luther King Jr., and Greta Thunberg and take notes
using a triple Venn diagram that will help them answer the question,
“How do change makers overcome challenges?”
3. Planning for transfer: Activities that invite students to form
concepts and make connections between them prime the brain for
transfer—in each of these stages of conceptual thinking, we help
students to reason abstractly and identify the “So what?” of their
learning. Once students have formed connections between concepts and
articulated these as understandings, we can provide them with
opportunities to apply them to new situations. This allows students to
see the relevance of their learning to both near and far contexts.
Transfer activities:
Give students a novel case study to grapple with and invite them to
apply their understandings. Ask them to revise their thinking: How
might we need to change our original idea to include the new case study?
Invite students to take a stance on a provocative statement and debate
using their prior knowledge and understanding. For instance, “Plants
are the most important organisms within an ecosystem” could be
discussed at the end of an ecosystems unit.
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