Concept-based Teaching for Effective Learning!

Concept-based Learning: Boosting Learning Within Classrooms

Teachers struggle constantly with the huge load of facts and topics that must be covered. However, what if we - as teachers - could use a strategy that would help our students make neural connections beyond those facts and concepts hence making their learning process a meaningful one? 

Concept-based instruction facilitates transdisciplinary learning by connecting new mental constructs to prior knowledge, new concepts and ideas across subjects in order to develop deep understanding. Among the strategies that fall under this big title is to allow students make generalizations, develop big ideas, ask questions to connect new information into prior ones as well as to real life. The 'Why we are learning this?' and 'Why is this important to know or do?' center the learning into useful ideas, make students motivated upon learning, and allow the brain to make deeper connections and patterns between macro and microconcepts as well as to mentally construct and organize ideas. 

This type of meaningful learning triggers integrated thinking as students are going to face different types of questions, make discussions that trigger higher order thinking, and helps them integrate between factual and conceptual learning. 

The 5E lesson Cycle

Creating Freedom and Opportunities to Learn!

The 5E cycle is considered to be the most successfully implemented inquiry-based strategy within science and math classes. As its name indicated, it is divided into 5 order stages: Engagement, Exploration, Explanation, Elaboration, and Evaluation. 

1. Engagement

Or what we call the 'magnet' or the 'hook' to grab your learner's attention towards the topic. It is the most important part that should make students too curious and excited to learn more about the concept. As a teacher, you need to make it as much personal as possible to them by bringing in something that they experience every day. Demonstrate experiments, ask questions, tell a story, show a riddle or a video to elicit their thinking, let them make predictions, identify misconceptions and start making connections to reach out an answer.

2. Exploration

Now, it's time to further explore the concept and develop ideas. It is time to make discoveries and try out their own ideas. Let them ask questions, make discussion activities, do some research, draw or write down their findings hence revising and refining their current ideas along with making connections to prior ones.  

3. Explanation 

It is not your turn now as a teacher, Nah! It's the learners' time to verbalize and share their findings and idea with the class using their own words. They are going to present their work and through whole class discussions, they are going to refine their thoughts as deeper understanding will take place hence heling them make meaning out from the previous two Es. 

4. Elaboration 

For concepts to be further refined and deeply understood, there is a need to extend and apply the knowledge to a new situation or a different scenario in order to tell if students have really grasped the desired ideas. It is time to provide new challenges! Real world applications or experiments, assigning group work, giving new questions can all add more details to move from simple into deep understanding. 

5. Evaluation 

At the end of the lesson, it is essential to give students an opportunity to reflect and demonstrate their understanding through creating a product and evaluating it. Rubrics and checklists are one of the ways that are used to provide students with guidelines or criteria for the self or peer assessment hey are going to provide. 

As one could tell, the 5E model falls under the student-centred strategies as all its stages focus on the student as the ones responsible for their own learning. The teacher would be the facilitator of discussions, the monitor of work and the guide to provide help when needed. 

Through inquiry, there is always an opportunity for students to try out their ideas and questions because it strengthens their engagement, elicits their thinking, and fosters their achievements!

Inquiry-based Learning: An Educational Trend

Let them ask, investigate, reflect, discuss, and create!

The inquiry-based method focuses on students' drawing on their own experiences and findings to develop inferences and make sense of phenomena. It strengthens students' engagement, elicits their thinking and fosters their achievements. In contrary to traditional learning, the students' ideas are at the centre of the learning process as knowing the correct answer is no longer the most valuable trait. Instead, students need to be prepared to the world outside the classroom, they need to become skilled in the way they ask questions, use their knowledge to think of answers to their everyday problems, be inventive and creative, and discover the outside world. 

As educators, it is our role to be the guide moving all around the classroom, not the person who is just standing in front of the board, talking and talking and talking all the time, asking them to repeat, and celebrating their high grades for rote learning; but forgetting about the zero they will take when they face life while we are not there for them.