Episode Transcript
[00:00:13] Speaker A: Welcome back to Talking elt, the easiest place to learn about the big issues in English language teaching.
In this, the last episode of our series on concept based inquiry with Carla Marschall and Fiona Bedel, we discuss how you can apply this approach in the classroom, from how to get started to integrating it into a course you are already using, as well as how to keep your managers and parents on side.
Enjoy the episode. I think we want to look in this particular session at how we actually go about putting into practice this concept based inquiry approach, especially if you're new to it and you're thinking, well, what do I actually do?
And so I turn to you first, Carla. If you were talking to a teacher who's kind of new to this approach, where would you suggest they begin if they want to think about taking a concept based inquiry approach?
[00:01:17] Speaker B: I think the first thing I would do is ask them to tell me a little bit about the curriculum design that they have at the moment. Because some teachers have more flexibility, some have less flexibility depending on their context. You know, some places in the world they're using a scripted curriculum, they cannot move away from that. Others, they have a national curriculum. The national curriculum is very knowledge and skill heavy.
Some are more in an independent environment where they have that flexibility. So I would say that you have to tailor your approach based on the curriculum that you are required to deliver as a teacher in your school.
And if a teacher is starting to think about this approach from perhaps a more compact curriculum, let's say they are using a national curriculum that just has, you know, reams and reams and reams of knowledge and skills that are listed there. What I would ask them to do is to look at that curriculum through a lens of intentionality. Where do we see particular ideas being repeated, where we could perhaps draw out a big idea or two, that we could then structure the units in a way where there's more synergy between the pieces of knowledge that are named in it. And really the starting point for this is getting teachers to start doing planning from big ideas. So if they have to work from a syllabus, look at the syllabus. What are the big ideas that emerge from that? You know, we start from the concrete, move to the abstract. We do that with our learners. We do it with teachers too.
So you notice that. And I'll go back to that animal example because we've mentioned it a few times in this podcast. You see that you have to look at animal needs, you have to look at survival in a habitat, you have to look at Migration. Okay, so what are some of the big ideas here? How can I package all these pieces of this very knowledge heavy syllabus into, you know, perhaps a more streamlined version? By creating a big idea. And so that would be the first step. Create a few big ideas and start to work conceptually from those.
And then of course develop some questions that allow students to acquire the required knowledge and skills from a national curriculum. But also that add on is the few conceptual questions so that you can give that particular set of knowledge and skills a deeper meaning.
[00:03:55] Speaker A: Because I imagine you would probably argue that even if a teacher finds themselves in a very knowledge heavy curriculum and they know they're going to be tested on the knowledge, that their engagement with it at a deeper level is going to help them retain that knowledge.
Even if that becomes the kind of the thing that they're going to be tested against.
[00:04:18] Speaker B: Absolutely. And we see that in the research that memorization is enhanced when we start to make connections between pieces of knowledge. And you look at things like cognitive load theory and they talk about that number of five to seven items that you can hold in your head when you start making links between pieces of knowledge. It actually means that the brain packages that information in a different way where it's connected. So it reduces the number of things that you're thinking about at once and it supports the acquisition of the knowledge. So we always want to be thinking about the fact that this is not only about the big ideas and the transfer, it's also about being more efficient and effective with the way that we ask students to develop knowledge and skills in perhaps a curriculum where there's just tons and tons of stuff that they're supposed to acquire.
[00:05:15] Speaker A: Fiona, if you were speaking to a language teacher, English language teacher, who was thinking about, yes, this sounds really good, but I'm not sure where to start. Is there any advice you'd give to them?
[00:05:28] Speaker C: Yeah, so I mean, I suppose I'm thinking back to when we first started the whole process of writing plutot, which is a very long time ago actually it was deepest lockdown. And we, yeah, we started with a methodology that we didn't know a huge amount about.
So one of the things that I found most useful actually was watching videos. So Carla's book has some nice videos in it, doesn't it Carla? For the different phases of the inquiry. And I found that really helpful to get my head around how, particularly the generalization phase, how that works. So I would say I think Blue Dot is going to have some videos as well. So sometimes it's it can be really good. Just give yourself a little bit of time to look at how that works.
And then, yeah, as Carla says, you can start with the syllabus, you have the materials that you have and find a generalization from them that you can then work towards.
And yeah, then the other thing I would say is that it can be really helpful to be collaborative. So if you do have other teachers that you can put your heads together to come up with how to make it work, I think that really helps because planning is really important to get it working seamlessly. And as Carla was saying earlier about the cognitive load and you can't just throw these very big conceptual questions at students without the right preparation. So I think just to make it work as seamlessly as possible, I think it does involve a bit of planning of what those guiding questions are and what the different case studies need to be. And if you have the opportunity to work with colleagues to come up with it together, I think it will reap benefits.
[00:07:15] Speaker A: I think that seems to be a really good point, that thinking beyond your own classroom, what's happening in other classrooms?
I think when we're talking about how ready your students are for a more concept based inquiry approach, one of the factors may be what's happening in the other classrooms and across the school. So if there are other teachers in other subjects, for example, who are more inquiry based in their approach, you can expect your students to have stronger skills in that area and to build off that. But if the whole of the school is just very rote learning facts, you know, you've got to provide more scaffolding.
[00:08:04] Speaker C: And it's going to take time to develop those skills, isn't it? You know, that first discussion you have with your students, it may take a little bit of time to get them going, but yeah, I think. And then the other thing that I wanted to say was remember to be flexible so you plan, but equally, you know, be responsive to what the children are coming up with and roll with that.
Yeah, definitely.
[00:08:34] Speaker A: So there we're thinking of a situation where there's quite a tight curriculum. If you have a bit more flexibility, perhaps it's an English language course where the outcomes are quite general in terms of communication skills and you can plan the design of your course. Is there a particular way you might approach that, Carla?
[00:08:58] Speaker B: So if you had more flexibility, then you might start with more curriculum mapping where you look at your full year and you think about, okay, what would be some knowledge and skills that would be really important for that particular grade level or level of proficiency, depending on how the children are grouped. And then you could think about based on those knowledge and skills, how do I want to package them in, in interesting creative units that are going to be really meaningful for my learners. So you would put them into unit frameworks and then think about the big ideas that would be sitting on top of the, the knowledge and skills. And you'd probably have a few ideas, not just one for each unit. And they might reflect both the areas of English language learning. You know, you might have something specific for listening skills or for reading skills, you know, reading comprehension. You might have a specific understanding you want the kids to develop. But then you would also have specific knowledge based understandings that reflects the reflect the context for learning. So if they're going to be doing that unit looking at, for example, pollution, then you're going to have something around waste management practices and how they impact on the environment. And these understandings would then sit side by side.
Of course, within that context, then you could think about, these are my big ideas. I want to provide some student agency. At what point would they have the skills required to be able to have more of a guided approach instead of a more structured inquiry approach? And then you could think about where that would be. Maybe it comes in unit three instead of unit one.
So this is where teachers really have that creative flexibility, thinking about what is best for their learners and then building a curriculum around knowledge, skills and big ideas.
[00:11:00] Speaker A: Right. That sounds really interesting.
Fiona, in Blue Dot, you've kind of woven in some elements from concept based inquiry.
How are you hoping that teachers will respond to those elements?
How will they feel?
[00:11:20] Speaker C: Just before I talk about that, I just wanted to say that in a language classroom with cpi, I don't want people to think that it's an all or nothing approach. So we're not saying you have to teach your grammar by the CPI approach or your recovery. I mean, we've still got all the standard basics that you would expect from a language course. That's still all there. So yeah, so it's great.
[00:11:50] Speaker A: It will feel familiar.
[00:11:51] Speaker C: Yes, it'll feel familiar and it's. Yeah, so we're not changing everything in the classroom. We're changing the response to the reading, listening and video things and getting a lot of discussion into it. But all those things of the structured speaking syllabus and writing syllabus, all that is still there.
So it's still recognizably the scaffolding for, you know, for developing from early learners all the way through.
[00:12:26] Speaker A: So it's more like Opportunity, you've been finding opportunities to enhance what they may already be familiar with.
[00:12:34] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. So, but what it's going back to what you were asking about, what I would hope that the teachers and the students get from blue do perhaps don't get from other things. So yeah, I mean, it comes back again to the incredible opportunities to build their critical thinking, their deeper analysis and bringing that classroom learning into the real world and vice versa. So it's building connections. Yeah, connections between different concepts, connections between different areas of the curriculum and different parts of their life and bringing, making all of these multiple sources of information that we have around us, bringing it all together and not having that sort of. This is what happens outside class and this is what happens inside class. Trying to bring.
Yeah, really looking for the connections in life and in the world and. Yeah, just preparing students for, for a world outside the classroom, I think.
[00:13:42] Speaker A: Right.
One thing I wanted to pick up, Carlo, which I'm not sure if we talked about before, was the idea of driving concepts in a lesson.
And could you just clarify what that really means and how teachers might use those in practice?
[00:14:03] Speaker B: So when we talked about what we mean by big ideas or generalizations or conceptual understandings, we talked about that as being, being two or more concepts linked in a conceptual relationship. We, we say that as a statement.
So we, we've already explored a few. I'll remind us of one, which is something like living things survive in an environment by meeting their needs. Right. And in that big idea, we have a number of concepts like living, living thing, the idea of survival, the idea of an environment, the idea of needs. And in a unit where you have a range of conceptual understandings or big ideas that you're working towards, there will be a number of concepts that will be the most important to be explicit around in terms of concept formation activities with learners. And we would call these our driving concepts. So we would think about, depending on the age and stage of learners, something like needs. If the kids are five or six, that's a driving concept. They don't understand the difference between wants and needs as well as a 10 year old. Right. So you have to think about who are the learners, what is their conceptual understanding coming into the unit, and then how are we going to construct a really good deep learning experience for them. So you would use those driving concepts in the focus phase and provide opportunities, for example, where students are doing, comparing and contrasting. They might do picture sorts, they might do examples and non examples, which one fits, which one doesn't fit those types of things to Be able to really understand what those concepts mean. So when you come around to generalize later on in the unit, then the students really understand what those concepts represent and they can start to create relationships between them. So when we talk about driving concepts, we're really talking about the, you know, seven to 10 concepts in a unit that need to be explored explicitly with learners. Learners in order to ensure that they can create conceptual understandings that are not oversimplified or overgeneralizations where they're actually true and represent the examples that they've seen earlier in the unit.
[00:16:22] Speaker A: There's some questions I wanted to ask, really to both of you, kind of the bigger picture of this. So the first thing I wanted to ask was the change that this approach can engender with the students.
You know, if you are using a more concept based inquiry approach, what kind of changes have you noticed or would you expect to see in your students?
Carla, can I start with you?
[00:16:54] Speaker B: I mean, something that I can share is that I started as a classroom teacher. I've taught grade one, grade two, grade three, all the way up to grade seven. I've been in classrooms all the way up to grade 12. There are always kids who can go, like, up to the abstract level and they don't need any help from the teacher. Right. So there might be, I don't know, 10 to 15% of kids, and those are those kids that are kind of highly analytical and abstract thinkers to begin with, and they just need a little bit of a nudge and they get there. What concept based inquiry does is it creates a level playing field for all the other kids that might need more support in moving from thinking more concretely to thinking more abstractly. And it helps them develop the skills to be able to identify patterns and relationships and articulate those in a way that we can see those ideas transfer to other situations and contexts. And for me, one of the main benefits that you see is that equity of experience, that all kids get the experience to be able to think abstractly and develop their own ideas. And this is incredibly powerful because, you know, we think that, you know, sometimes with kids like, oh, that child is more motivated, that child's less motivated. But actually, when you see that they are able to develop their own ideas, they feel empowered. They have high levels of agency. They can start to discuss with their peers what they're thinking. They can use evidence to back up those ideas. And I believe you really see a transformation in the relationship between children and their school experience.
Earlier, we were talking a little bit about how students engage in the classroom. And kids are very good at playing the game of school.
If they are supposed to do memorization and recall and they know that that's what the teacher values, then they will do that. Right. When you start to move to a concept based inquiry approach, it's based on discussions around, exploring ideas around thinking about if something is true or not, then they start to shift what they think of as the purpose of education. And I think that's incredibly powerful for us as teachers too.
[00:19:13] Speaker A: That's wonderful. Okay, so the next question I had was if you were advising a school. So a lot of people listening to this podcast will be thinking about what about my school?
So what advice would you give them if they were thinking of introducing more concept based inquiry approaches within their school?
Actually, Fiona, let me start off with you.
[00:19:40] Speaker C: Yeah, so I think we're saying that it's important to realize it's not a complete 100% change. You know, you're still doing all the things that happened before, but you're just giving extra opportunities for the things that we really want, the change maker mindset and the deeper thinking.
So, yeah, I mean, I would say if you're school management, give your teachers a little bit of time just to grapple with the new way of planning. So planning is really key.
So I do think it's to set it up for success, give a little bit of time to let people collaborate, let people investigate themselves to make sure that it'll work well.
[00:20:34] Speaker A: Presumably if they were to use Carla's book as a way of introducing some of the, as you said, a lot of the videos that attach to there, that would be really helpful.
[00:20:43] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, that's really good. And I mean, if they don't want, I mean, in terms of planning time to set up a syllabus on a CBI methodology from scratch. It's obviously time consuming. Setting up any syllabus is time consuming. But with Blue Dot, we've done a lot of the hard work already. So it's a pretty much ready made, off the shelf. I mean, you're still going to need to learn how to use it and we've got a really strong introduction in there and yeah, hopefully some videos and ways to support teachers to do it. But yeah, so a lot of that hard work is done and it's a ready to go. Really well thought out. Yeah, yeah. And then as you get more confident with using that, you know, maybe you want to go off the page a bit more and go a bit more independent with how you deliver it. But I Think it's a really good, accessible starting point.
[00:21:42] Speaker A: Carla, as a school leader yourself, if you meet other school leaders, what might you say to them if they're hesitant?
[00:21:50] Speaker B: I mean, I would always say start with your early adopters. You have always a group of teachers that are really keen on trying something out in the classroom, and you start with those individuals because really the proof is in the pudding. When teachers can go into someone else's classroom and see the level of thinking that students are engaging in, that is the moment where they go, I want my own kids to be able to do that. And then you've, you've got those examples in the classroom from their peers. So I'm very much about really strategically moving through a school by starting with some teachers, some classrooms, some units even. And then once people start to see the benefits tangibly in their learners, then you can start to spread that in a more networked way. Instead of kind of an all size fits, you know, one size fits all kind of approach to school improvement. We see a lot of fatigue. You know, post Covid, there's a lot of fatigue in schools with all of the things that teachers have had to manage coming back after Covid. Mental health and, you know, attendance and other things have been a major stressor in the classroom. And so to expect everyone to do it all at once, I think doesn't take into account the unique experience of every teacher. And, you know, we want to be humane and also thinking about how the school can best implement ideas without burdening, you know, some members of the, of the school community.
[00:23:35] Speaker A: That's such good advice. I really like the, I, you know, the suggestion of focusing on your early adopters, I think, and the proof being in the pudding, I think that's, that's really good.
I, I wanted to kind of end by thinking of the parents because, you know, in some ways parents are the ones who think about their children's welfare, etc. The most and they might worry, okay, is this a different approach? Is this, is this going to help my students, my children, get to where they, where I want them to get to.
So if you were finding yourself talking to parents about this approach, what would you say to them about the benefits of a concept based inquiry approach?
[00:24:23] Speaker B: Carla, I think that parents are very concerned about a few things. One of them is university admissions, obviously, and the other is work and gainful employment later in life. They want their child to be successful. And when we see how students perform when they get to A levels or the International Baccalaureate or some other national equivalent in terms of their diploma. The kids who learn conceptually often will outperform their peers who focus on memorization and recall. And the reason for that is there will often be questions that they will need to answer on exams that will require higher levels of thinking where they have to not only explain, but they need to analyze and evaluate, evaluate. And these are skills that are developed the whole time when we're using a concept based inquiry approach. The other aspect in terms of the world of work is really to look at and learn from what industry is telling us. And you know, in another podcast, I mentioned the top, top skills of 2025, which comes out from the World Economic Forum, and this is where they ask business leaders, you know, what are the skills that are the most important in employees now in 2025? And when you look at the top five skills, you know, around learning to learn skills, critical thinking skills, creative thinking skills, analytical thinking skills, these are all things which are developed through a concept based inquiry approach that aren't developed through a traditional recall focused curriculum or pedagogical approach. And so I think this really helps to create a narrative for our parents that we want to make sure they're successful. We see what universities want, we see what employers want, and these are the skills that are enabling young people today to be successful.
[00:26:29] Speaker A: Wonderful. Thank you. Jonas, anything you'd like to add to that?
[00:26:33] Speaker C: Yeah, I suppose the other thing that Carla didn't mention was just the environment, especially our teenagers and all these messages that they're surrounded by, some of which as parents, you're not necessarily too happy with the conclusions they might be coming to. You know, there's a lot of toxic material out there. And I think if we in class time are giving students the opportunity to take different case studies, learn how to analyze it and synthesize it and come to conclusions and really interrogate the information that they're coming to, I think this is a really valuable skill for navigating the world of social media as well. So not only about your future sort of success in life, but even just for the here and now, I think that's something that parents really worry about, is the influences that are coming to bear on their children. And I think giving them the, the mental skills to really work things out rigorously and independently of, you know, to have a system almost to deal with these messages coming out, I think will be really important.
[00:27:46] Speaker A: Wonderful. I agree. So thank you, both of you. This has been a really fantastic series of podcasts. Been very interesting to de. Deep dive into all these concepts. And I hope this has been really useful. Thank you very much.
[00:28:03] Speaker C: Thank you for having us.
[00:28:04] Speaker B: Thank you for having us.
[00:28:06] Speaker A: Thanks for listening to this episode of Talking elt, the easiest place to learn about the big issues in English language teaching.
That brings us to the end of our conversation on Concept Based Inquiry. I just want to say a big thank you to Carla and Fiona for joining us. Don't forget to like and subscribe if you want to learn more about this issue and others like it. If you want to learn more about concept based Inquiry and how you can take that next step beyond inquiry based learning, you can download our position paper on the topic authored by Carla. Just follow the link in the description. Thanks for joining us.
[00:28:47] Speaker B: Sat.
