Reflections on Teaching and Learning in a Concept-Based Curriculum

Back in 2012 I was sent by my school to attend a workshop offered by Lynn Erickson.  The title of the workshop was, like her 2007 book, Concept-Based Curriculum and Instruction for the Thinking Classroom.  This was the first time I had been exposed to such a way of thinking and to be honest at first met it with great scrutiny.  If you have ever watched videos concerning concept based teaching and learning or read any of the literature or attended any of the conferences, you would, too!  It all seemed very much like all other educational theories out there - drummed up by academics who have never been in the classroom in their lives or, if they have, it was 10+ years ago.  But is was some of the examples that caught my attention and made me think about how I taught and how many of my teachers taught me.  While having dinner with other teachers, we discussed the first day and if it really was feasible.  Some of us said, "Sure in a  PYP Classroom where there are not high-stakes exams nor demands of preparing kids for the DP, but not in the higher grades.  There is simply no time for it.  They have to know all the facts in order to do well."  That was what got me to think about education and how it has has for so long been stuck in a vicious cycle of rote memorization and regurgitation of facts.  Students would come to class and be told the key points and facts, causes and effects for their subjects and be tested on their recall knowledge of what they were told. 

Was this really what we wanted for our students?  What this what I wanted for my own children?  How much did I really know about what I learned in school and how much could I use it in context? Was simply knowing the facts giving our students the 21st Century skills required by today's employers?  Certainly not, but what else could we do?  They simply had to learn the material.  They had to, as Brady (2011) puts it, learn the highly-specific standards for each academic subject in bits and pieces, not considering the connections.  He argues, however that it is more important is for students to have a system organizing and integrating what they know so that they can see the "big picture.  Erickson (2007) explains further by arguing that while facts remain important and necessary, it is how they learn those facts and what we have our students do with the facts that is important.  In today's world, employers care less about what you know and more about what you can do with what you know.  

With the growing popularity of tablets and smartphones, the facts are now at your fingertips.  Erickson argues that there needs to be a shift in how we develop our curriculum and teach our students how to think and how to make generalizations that are grounded in the facts for the topics we teach and developed through conceptual understands.  Those conceptual understandings would be subjectless, timeless and transferrable.  They would allow for students to continue thinking and making connections from class to class, very much unlike how Brady (2011) describes the traditional style of education.  By building the teaching and learning on a conceptual framework students would be able to synthesize their learning, transfer their skills and develop critical thinking and problem solving capabilities that are integral in today's workforce.   Sackson (2012) blogged a summary of twitter conversations between teachers who were collaborating on a unit of inquiry.  I would encourage you to take a look at see how it can really work.

So ground-breaking was this research that the International Baccalaureate brought Lynn Erickson along with other leading experts in the field such as Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe to completely rehaul the Middle Years Program (MYP).  The result of a two year study saw the International Baccalaureate MYP completely transformed.  For an international organization such as the IB to make such a change in their educational stance, policy and resources it must be considered to be something special.  Teaching and learning in IB MYP classrooms are now transforming from a place where the facts are learned and given back to a place where learning is based on concepts, and generalizations are leading to transfer.  No longer are questions in history class being asked like: "What were the significant events of WW2?", but now we seem then becoming more conceptual, still requiring the factual knowledge required by states and even the common core.  Questions are now more commonly asked in IB MYP classrooms like, "To what extend did the events of WW2 impact the social, economic and geographic structure of the world?"  In my math class, for example, I do not simple teach students about probability and statistics in isolation.  We learn how they can be used to inform our decisions.  The conceptual idea for my math class is that The Choices we make today will have a profound impact on the quality and quantity of our choices in the future.  The big idea here is that students need the facts and content knowledge of probability and statistics in order to make informed choices.  Without informed choices there will be poor decisions.  

The educational topic of concept based teaching and learning is beginning to have some serious effects on organizations such as the IB as well as the Common Core.  Many of the standards for history in the Common Core are now conceptual in nature, with more such  subject changes promised to come.

Sources:

Brady, M (2011).  Thinking Big: A Conceptual Framework For the Study of Everything.  Retrieved from http://pypacademymiami2011.wikispaces.com/file/view/BRADY+Eng.pdf

Erickson, H. L. (2007). Concept-Based Curriculum and Instruction for the Thinking Classroom.  Thousand Oaks, California, USA: Corwin Press

Sackson, E. (2012).  Concept Driven Learning.  Retrieved from https://whatedsaid.wordpress.com/2012/05/26/concept-driven-learning/

The International Baccalaureate.  http://www.ibo.org