Episode Transcript
[00:00:12] Speaker A: Welcome back to Talking elt the easiest place to learn about the big issues in English language teaching.
In this third episode of our series on concept based inquiry with Carla Marshall and Fiona Bedel, we look at how you and your students can benefit from using a concept based inquiry approach and how it can help your students with their critical thinking, their creativity and their ability to work collaboratively. Enjoy the episode. What I'd like to look at now is some of the benefits of taking a concept based inquiry approach because clearly this is something which needs some more effort from the teachers to do so. You know, what's in it for them? What are the, what's in it for the students? What are the benefits? So I was going to start with you, Carla, and ask, you know, how does concept based inquiry go beyond surface learning to engage the intellectual curiosity of students?
So that's a curiosity and also their critical thinking skills. I'm asking big questions here.
You know, I think you've hinted at it, the, the, the importance of critical thinking in this.
Can you explain how you think this will actually help develop their critical thinking skills?
[00:01:37] Speaker B: Sure, yeah. I mean the, the classrooms where I've been able to either co teach or observe and be part of the classroom while they were doing concept based inquiry lessons, you just see a different side of K. You know, in a traditional classroom that focuses more on direct instruction, there's a real dependence on the teacher.
Kids often are a little bit spoon fed, you know, and then they get done with something and they say, what do I do now? You know, and they're, they're a little bit aimless. You could say, not in all cases. But in some cases I've definitely seen that. In the inquiry lessons that I've seen that have really focused on deep understanding, you, you see students shift to have conversations with their peers which are much more analytical and critical and starting to look at kind of ideas and why or why not those ideas may hold true. You know, I've heard conversations where kids talking about, you know, how Muhammad Ali had his bike stolen when he was a kid and this was an example of discrimination. And you know, when people experience discrimination or they have a strong emotional reaction in childhood, then that may inspire them to innovate. Where you just go like that is incredible. Like you wouldn't anticipate that that comes from a 10 year old. But when we create space for kids and really allow them to deeply explore knowledge and skills with intentional questioning and then help them to organize those ideas in some way using graphic organizers or other tools, then students can really start to below the surface and explore ideas in a much more nuanced and sophisticated way.
And what I've seen from them is just engagement. You know, you see that the kids are on task, they're engaged, they're curious, they're asking each other ideas, they're collaborative because the focus moves to the ideas as opposed to perhaps focusing on a task. It's not a task oriented classroom anymore. It becomes an idea focused one.
The examples I've seen in classrooms have always been really inspiring for me in terms of the power of the pedagogy.
[00:04:08] Speaker A: Yeah, it's interesting. I find myself these days often talking to teachers who are concerned about their students critical thinking skills, their thinking skills, particularly in the world of generative AI. And they're thinking that their students are delegating the thinking to the. To chatgpt. And how can they develop those critical thinking skills? And they may have tried things which are more conceptual and found it too much for their students. I think. I feel that one of the great benefits of the concept based inquiry approach is that it gives you a structure and an approach which is not throwing the child into the deep end, but is building up those skills in order to be able to cope with the more interesting things.
[00:04:55] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. And there's a clear direction of travel, isn't there, that you sort of, you know where you're. I mean, you don't always know where you're going because the children will come up with their own things sometimes. But yeah, I think that like you say, there's a good sort of scaffolding to it and yeah, and you're getting them to think really very hard about which sources are more reliable than others and all the analyzing and how they can organize it and how to justify their opinions. And yeah, there's a lot going on in those discussions.
[00:05:29] Speaker B: So just building off of what Fiona was sharing, I always like to think about concept based inquiry and this idea of having a bit of structure for students as like a haiku. You know, a haiku is extremely simple. Five syllables, seven syllables, five syllables. But actually that structure can be very liberating because you know what your framework is within which you're working and the possibilities are endless. You know, there's so many different haikus that exist. So when we move to a place of not just, you know, oh, we're going to let students go and explore whatever they want and hopefully they'll develop some big ideas. We move from that to something that's intentionally structured to be able to get them to Some big ideas at the end of the day, with particular pedagogical strategies, particular organizers, use of questions, then we can actually create a space for them where they experience high levels of agency and freedom within that structure.
[00:06:27] Speaker A: Yeah, that's right. It's interesting when you say that, it reminds me of someone talking about the way that removing structure can actually almost paralyze you, giving an analogy of playing tennis without a net and without court lines. It becomes almost impossible to do it. So you sometimes in order to achieve things, you need that structure, I think.
Yeah. I mean, part of the interesting thing here is looking at how we encourage students to become better at transferring what they've learned, transferring their skills beyond the initial lesson.
I want to ask you, Carla, in terms of concept based inquiry, how do we encourage students to apply what they learn in class to multiple different contexts and situations, perhaps inside or perhaps outside the class?
[00:07:26] Speaker B: It's a great question. And I think transfer gets discussed as the holy grail of education.
We want students to take what they've learned in the classroom and be able to do something with it, whether it's in the classroom later on in the school year, whether it's a different classroom, whether it's outside in their lives in the world.
When we talk about transfer, it's not just one thing. There's near transfer, which is students applying their learning to a similar context. And then there's far transfer, which might be developing particular skills in, let's say, English language, and then applying those in a completely different area, like, you know, design and technology or something like that. So I think I can speak a little bit first about near transfer and how that's quite explicit in concept based inquiry, as Fiona described. You know, as we're moving around that inquiry cycle and we get to the generalized phase, we want students to develop their own big ideas. Then what we do is we think, okay, what examples or situations might I be able to present to students to get them to think whether or not this idea is actually true?
And I'll give one example of a situation where a teacher got students to develop a big idea and then realized it was not necessarily true. So. So she did a unit on migration and looked a lot at benefits of migration. And often it was poll migration, a better life employment opportunity somewhere else. And so the kids had generalized something like people migrate to explore new opportunities.
I'm not sure if someone is a slave and is enforced migration that they would necessarily agree with that. So she actually looked at the student's idea and then thought, what example of Forced migration of diaspora. Might I provide to the kids in an age appropriate developmental way to get them to see, does this actually work or not? Or do I need to shift my idea? And what the kids ended up doing is they wrote many people or some people instead of people generally, so that they understood that that idea is true for many people. They do migrate for opportun. But there are others that might have a completely different situation where that's not the case. So that would be an example of near transfer. And we can use various news sources. So I've used like news articles before or a short video or a different text.
Sometimes we provide a performance task for kids. So let's say they're learning how to develop a personal narrative and they've done that by looking at a variety of mentor texts. Then we may say, now it's your turn and you need to create your own by applying some of the skills and strategies that you've seen in those other mentor texts. And then you need to really explain why you made those choices. We may also provide some opportunities for taking action, for service learning in the community. So there's a range of ways that transfer might look in a concept based inquiry, but it may not always happen within that four or six weeks of a unit. It could be that it extends, you know, something happens in the news three months later and you go, that's a really good example for my students to reflect on a prior unit and you may bring the unit back to that transfer point way after a unit is done.
[00:11:09] Speaker A: Fantastic. Very interesting. Fiona, in Blue Dot, is transfer something you've thought about?
[00:11:17] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, it's a really important part of it. So we have. I was interested in what Carla was saying about coming back to things, you know, potentially months later. Yeah, I think that's what's really important about this concept based learning, that you can come back to it. So we have, in Bluedot, we have a concept portfolio that is children collecting their own ideas, their own things. So yeah, if they see something in the news or something on the street or whatever, some experience in a different classroom, then they can bring that in and they can collect all their thoughts and ideas and keep checking in on those conceptual understandings and checking that they're still valid as their understanding progresses and evolves, you know, do they need to refine what, what their conceptual thinking is, which is obviously really important in life, isn't it, to be able to have these ideas, but then also to be able to adapt them as new evidence comes in or as new situations evolve? Then your thinking needs to evolve with it. So yeah, we were very keen on doing that in Blue Dot. And then Carla mentioned the taking action aspect of transfer. So yeah, after, in Blue Dot we've got the phase where they're generating their big idea. And then after that, while we were planning it, we called it the so what question. So okay, so we've got this conceptual understanding. Why does it matter? What will we do with this?
So they have to complete that as well as their big idea. They have to complete this now that I know this, such and such will happen. So that's really important that they understand why it's important to them and what they can do about it.
So for example, off the top of my head, an example of that might be so, you know, diversity in ecosystems helps all animals within the ecosystem to survive or species.
So you what would be the so what? What's the that now that I know this, I will work to protect diversity in my local area, for example.
And then, yeah, so then at the end of every module we have a more explicit take action section where they're looking at different students around the world, very diverse places who have done got their generalizations, their conceptual understanding and thought. How can we make the world a better place now that we know this? How what can we do to use this information for the good of ourselves, of our communities, or of the world more generally? So we have lots of very diverse projects. So these projects, they're great for creativity and giving students agency. They might be make a podcast or a poster or design something that helps trees get enough water or you know, a whole variety of different types of project activities, but with a view to doing, taking some action that uses the, the conceptual understanding they've come up with in order to improve either themselves or the world or something like that.
[00:14:34] Speaker A: Because I think I read that within the Blue Dot course you often talk about change makers developing change makers.
[00:14:44] Speaker C: That's right.
[00:14:45] Speaker A: Is that related to what you're just saying?
[00:14:47] Speaker C: Absolutely, yeah. So this was one of the main sort of starting points of this course. We wanted it to develop the change makers of the future, really. And I think the take action projects are a big part of that. And we understood that not all classes have that opportunity to spend a long time developing projects. Some of the projects are relatively simple like make a leaflet, make a poster. Some of them are organize a community event or yeah, make a little film. I mean some of them are much more time consuming than others, but they're just for inspiration so students can come up with Their own thing that's realistic within their own context and also their inspiration to do outside class. So you don't actually. I mean, it's great if students can do these projects in class time, but if they can't, even just looking at them, thinking about them, what might you do, might you do if you had the time?
It gets students thinking about how their knowledge can be used in the outside world. And then sometimes teachers will find that something that they discussed and maybe did a little bit of planning for in a hypothetical way in class some of those students might go off and in the holidays they might do these things. So yeah, I think that's very much part of the ethos of bluedot is to create change makers. And yeah, just thinking through those stages of what you might do gives people the confidence to go out and do it for real, doesn't it?
[00:16:18] Speaker A: I agree.
We're talking here about the benefits of taking a concept based inquiry approach.
I think one of the other things that teachers obviously are challenged by is the fact that their students are quite diverse, you know, that they're not all uniform, they're quite different in many ways. And being able to manage that and the learning through that is what is one of the day to day challenges for teachers. Are there ways that concept based inquiry could help them with that, would you say, Carla?
[00:16:53] Speaker B: Oh, absolutely. I mean, one of the benefits of working conceptually is that because concepts have multiple examples, you can choose the examples that are the most relevant for your learners. So if you're in Turkey or in Kenya or in Japan or somewhere else, then you can't just choose one example and it's going to work for all learners. Right. So if you know that you're working conceptually, then you can start to choose the things that will resonate most with learners. And we might do that through, for example, text choices. So we might provide different texts for different groups, depending on their interests or their reading level or their home language background, we may provide different case studies that might resonate with different learners. And when I say case study, I mean, you know, an example. So it might be that they study different leaders. If you're looking at leadership or different inventors, if you're looking at invention or innovation.
And so once you start taking the context of learning to a more conceptual level, then what you're thinking about is the illustrative content that's the most relevant for your learners to help them to get to the big idea. And that's very different than a curriculum that's structured in a more topic based way or a more kind of knowledge based focused curriculum because then you're basically locked in a particular context. You know, if it says you're doing the tutors, then you're doing the tutors and it's not. You're not able to look at a different period of time or different place in the world with that. So I think the concept based inquiry approach really does support diversity by allowing teachers to think about, you know, who are my learners, what are their needs, and what's going to most resonate with them in terms of the particular context for learning.
[00:18:47] Speaker A: Thanks for listening to this episode of Talking elt, the easiest place to learn about the big issues in English language teaching. Don't forget to like and subscribe if you want to learn more about this issue and others like it.
Tune in again next time as we explore another aspect of concept based inquiry with Carla and Fiona. 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 listening.
