Team Concept Maps, SET #16
Today’s teaching tip is borrowed from Dr. Elizabeth Barkley’s text, Student Engagement Techniques: A Handbook for College Faculty (Jossey-Bass, 2010). This activity incorporates graphic organizers and can be used for many purposes such as helping students activate schema, assessing how well knowledge is remembered and understood, and encouraging creativity and collaboration.
Concept maps can be particularly useful. First, asking students to create them helps us and them pay attention to the schemata that they use to organize their learning. In addition, graphic organizers appeal to students with strong visual learning skills. Many students are accustomed to filling pages from side to side with text; asking them to use the white space differently and to be concise may help them add to the ways they record and remember information.
In “Team Concept Maps,” teams of students create a diagram that demonstrates their combined ideas or understanding of a complex concept, procedure, or process. Students are challenged to synthesize and be creative as they organize their associations into a meaningful graphic organizer.
Procedure:
1. Choose a concept, procedure, or process that is important in your course for students to map. This works best with something that has many associations and connections.
2. Brainstorm and write down terms and phrases that represent the most important parts of the concept.
3. Choose a graphic organizer/image that best captures the relationship. Examples of organizers that work for different purposes are a spoked wheel, a flowchart, a fishbone, a network tree) and then map the concept so you can make sure your image works.
4. Map a parallel concept to explain the process to students.
5. Decide what to use as a shared writing space and bring materials to class.
6. After you describe and demonstrate the process to students, distribute the materials and present the concept, procedure, or process that you want students to graph.
This technique is more effective when students are able to interact, but the outcomes can be captured as screenshots to save and share. You can see samples of concept maps on pp. 222-224 of Elizabeth Barkley’s book. The following websites may also be helpful if you are interested in reading more about mapping.
https://www.studygs.net/mapping/
https://www.inspiration.com/visual-learning/concept-mapping
https://www.udel.edu/chem/white/teaching/ConceptMap.html
https://serc.carleton.edu/NAGTWorkshops/assess/conceptmaps.html
Julie Damerell
ESOL_TRS
11/05/2012 |