How to Explain Concept Mapping as a Teaching Strategy
- 1). Explain to teachers how using concept maps for curriculum planning helps them understand what they want their students to learn, as opposed to what they want to teach. Concept maps are student-centered, problem-centered and focused on the understanding of relationships between concepts and ideas. Concept mapping in curriculum design makes the structure of knowledge more explicit, more accessible and more easily integrated by students.
- 2). Explain how to construct lesson plans using concept mapping. This will give teachers a more comprehensive understanding of the subject, eliminate sequencing errors, and develop lessons that are interdisciplinary. Teachers may find areas that are too trivial to include in the lesson, or themes they want to emphasize. It will help them to define their own expectations of the integration that they expect to occur, and develop a logically sequenced lesson plan to accomplish this goal. Concept maps also help teachers show students why particular concepts are worth understanding and how they relate to practical and theoretical issues in a particular discipline.
- 3). Show teachers how to ask students to draw a concept map as a diagnostic pre-assessment tool prior to beginning a unit. For instance, to make a concept map about photosynthesis, students write that word in the main concept box, and then connect it with arrows to related concepts and ideas written in separate boxes. These boxes might contain words like "sunlight," "energy," and "chemical reaction." Concept maps made at the beginning of a class will likely miss some important concepts and relationships. This initial attempt will provide immediate visual data to inform teachers about student levels of understanding.
- 4). Illustrate the value of using concept maps to make formative assessments during learning activities by asking students to draw increasingly detailed concept maps of the learning task. At the beginning of a unit, teachers provide an initial handout of a concept map in which major concepts are identified, but detail is missing. As the unit progresses, ask students to add more related ideas to the original concept. In repeating this process, students continue to review the major concepts and their relationships. Instructors can track student progress or misconceptions by collecting and reviewing the concept maps.