Instructions: In a substantive post, summarize at least three concepts or ideas you gathered from the DCL and Foundations lesson material that you feel have helped equip you to make better decisions or improve your ability to deliver briefings at the organizational level of leadership.
Summarize at least three concepts or ideas you gathered from the DCL
Topic: Reflection Post
Please see the Capstone reflection post assignment instructions. Please use the proper APA 7 format.
Instructions: In a substantive post, summarize at least three concepts or ideas you gathered from the DCL and Foundations lesson material that you feel have helped equip you to make better decisions or improve your ability to deliver briefings at the organizational level of leadership.
Reflective thinking requires thinking through the gathered information in detail to organize it, apply principles, make connections, and form conclusions. A suggested approach to reflective thinking involves asking yourself a set of questions. The following questions can serve as a foundation to improve your reflective thinking:
1. What does this information mean?
2. What conclusions can be drawn from this?
3. How can this information be used?
4. How does this fit with my existing knowledge and experiences?
5. What are the implications of this for others or me?
6. What is the big picture and how does this fit into it?
What are key concepts?
A concept is a mental representation of a class of things. Concepts are a way of grouping or categorising things to make sense of a complex and diverse world. For example, we have a concept of ‘chair’ into which fits a huge variety of actual chairs – tall ones, small ones, wooden ones, metal ones, old ones, new ones, fancy ones, plain ones and so on.
Through this grouping we create a shared framework for understanding, communication and action. Because we have the shared concept of ‘chair’, one person can ask another to get a chair from the next room without the second person returning with a table! Similarly, we have shared concepts of ‘lamp’, ‘plant’, ‘house’, ‘road’ and so on.
‘…everyday concepts are ‘picked up’ unconsciously by everyone in our daily lives and are acquired through experience…’ Young, (2015)
Each school subject involves a large number of concepts. These range from concepts that refer to simple, concrete things (for example, ‘bunsen burner’, ‘watercolour paint’, ‘basketball’) to those that refer to complex, abstract things (for example, ‘power’, ‘love’, ‘religion’).
‘Key’ concepts are ones judged to be particularly important in a certain context. A similar term is ‘big’ concepts. This includes a sense of scale and range, as well as importance, within the subject.
The concepts a person or group chooses as ‘key’ in a subject will vary according to their view of that subject and their purpose in selecting the set of key concepts. A teacher working with young children in science may choose a different set to an academic chemist working with undergraduates. Often, the concepts chosen as ‘key’ are complex and abstract, such as ‘place’, ‘chronology’ or ‘grammar’. However, they could also be simpler and concrete, such as ‘crown’, ‘tree’ or ‘coin’.
In this video, Dr Liz Taylor introduces key concepts and why they might or might not be shared with learners.
In the rest of this guide, we will discuss the benefits of using key concepts. We will look especially at their benefits in helping us to carry out high-quality planning for progression. We will look at the research behind key concepts and consider some practical ways of using them in medium and long-term planning.
Throughout, you will be encouraged to reflect on how you can use key concepts when planning your curriculum. At the end, there is a glossary of key words and phrases and some suggestions about what you could do next.
What is the research behind using key concepts in curriculum planning?
Concept formation is an area of research in psychology. It refers to how people acquire or learn to use concepts. In the ‘Big Book of Concepts’, Gregory Murphy summarises research in this area of psychology. Concept formation traces the way people develop an understanding of their experience, what systems of categorisation they develop, and how they learn and use these systems. This research often focuses on concepts of fairly basic, concrete things, for example, types of animals and their features.
Also, there is a range of education research about what children know and how they learn about particular concepts that form part of school subjects. Examples of these concepts include ‘sustainability’ in geography (Walshe, 2008) and ‘chemical elements’ in science (Taber, 1995). In history, Lee & Shemilt (2004, 2009) carried out research into the progress learners make in their understanding of key concepts. In science and related subjects, research into key concepts often focuses on identifying and dealing with learners’ misconceptions or ‘alternative conceptions’. (These are misunderstandings or previous ideas that can act as barriers to further learning on that topic.)
This research is useful when planning and teaching about particular concepts. It helps us to understand misconceptions young people may have about concepts and how we can support learners to make progress.
There are various approaches to thinking about types of concepts. Using substantive, second-order and threshold concepts (see below) is particularly helpful to inform high-quality planning for progression.
- Substantive and second-order concepts
The division between substantive and second-order concepts stems from ‘Science, Curriculum, and Liberal Education’, a selection of essays on the structure of disciplines by Joseph Schwab (1978).
In this approach, there are two sets of concepts.
• Substantive concepts: these are part of the ‘substance’ or content knowledge in a subject. (For example, in geography, these might include ‘river’, ‘trade’, ‘city’ or ‘ecosystem’.)
• Second-order concepts: these shape the key questions asked in a subject and organise the subject knowledge. (For example, a set of second-order concepts for history might include ’cause and consequence’ (causation), ‘change and continuity’, ‘similarity and difference’, and ‘historical significance’.
There will often be an overlap of substantive concepts between subjects. A student might learn about ‘renewable energy’ in science, geography, economics and politics. There may even be some overlap of second-order concepts, for example ‘change’ in both history and geography. It is the particular combination of substantive and second-order concepts that makes each discipline distinct and unique.
‘Content, therefore, is important, not as facts to be memorised…but because without it students cannot acquire concepts and, therefore, will not develop their understanding and progress in their learning.’ Young (2015)
2. Threshold concepts
A threshold concept is one that, once understood, modifies learners’ understanding of a particular field and helps them to make progress. It helps them to go through a ‘doorway’ into a new way of understanding a topic or subject. The idea comes from a research project on teaching and learning in undergraduate courses (Meyer and Land, 2003). While ‘core’ concepts build on existing learning, layer by layer, threshold concepts open up a new way of thinking.
Attachments
