Episode Transcript
[00:00:13] Speaker A: Welcome to a new series of Talking elt, the easiest place to learn about the big issues in language teaching. For this series we will be discussing Concept Based Inquiry, a new approach to helping children develop both their language skills and their more global skills of curiosity, creativity and collaboration.
I'm very pleased to be joined today by Carla Marschall and Fiona Bedel. Carla is currently Director at Dresden International School in Germany and has held school leadership roles in Singapore, Hong Kong and Switzerland.
She is the author of a recent position paper published by Oxford University Press on concept Based Inquiry and is also the co author of two books, Concept Based Inquiry in Action and Worldwide A Teacher's Guide to Shaping a Just Sustainable Future, both of those published by Corwin Press.
Fiona Bedel is an award winning author of educational books and has been involved in applying the concept based Inquiry approach within Oxford's new coursebook series for primary level learners called Blue Dot.
Thank you so much both of you for joining us to talk about this exciting new area of language teaching. So many of us have heard the term inquiry being used for teaching approaches, for example inquiry based learning. So I was wondering if I could start with you Carla, and ask, well, what does inquiry mean in this context and why is it important for learning?
[00:02:03] Speaker B: So I think what's really important to start with is inquiry is not a new idea. You know, you can go all the way back to the time of Socrates and, you know, Socratic questioning and all this, and it's something that has existed for a long time and comes up in education and pedagogy every now and again as something which is more necessary given what we're seeing in society. So basically the whole idea of inquiry is that we're structuring learning around compelling questions. Some of those questions may be designed by teachers based on whatever is in the written curriculum, and others may be designed by students based on their passions and their interests. And the reason why inquiry learning is so important is it shifts the nature of the pedagogy from a passive pedagogy where, for example, in direct instruction where learners are receiving demonstration or mini lessons and they are receiving that from the teacher without necessarily constructing knowledge themselves. When you move to more of a question based approach, you're really asking students to be active in the learning process, to have agency and ownership over their learning. And when we look at the trends in the world of work, for example, what's just come out from the World Economic Forum in terms of the skills for 2025, we see things like learning to learn skills, very high critical Thinking, analytical, think. And these are all skill sets that are developed through inquiry based approaches.
[00:03:39] Speaker A: Yeah, that's fantastic. Thank you. And Fiona, what are some of the ways that teachers might use inquiry based learning in their classrooms?
[00:03:50] Speaker C: So, yeah, so you would often kick off your unit of inquiry with a big question. So if it was about animals, it might be why do we protect animals? Or something like this, or if it was about history, how do we know what happened, happened long ago? So these would be big questions that you might start your unit of inquiry. As Carla says, it might be something that the teachers provided. So there are course books that do this and then you would investigate that question in different ways in the class and come to some conclusions and collect the information to come to some conclusions.
Sometimes we would use a KWL chart to do this. So a KWL chart, it's got three columns. The first column on the left is the K column and that would be what you know. So when you're starting with a new module of inquiry, you write what you already know in the K column, then you've got the W column in the middle for what you want to know. And so that's the key to kicking off. You're finding out where the students areas of curiosity are and as much as possible, you're following those areas of curiosity to tailor what they learn in class. And then at the end of the process you'll fill in the right hand column, which is the L column, what they've learned during class time. So yeah, so the KWL chart, that's one way that it's. But yeah, as Carla says, there's quite a spectrum between the teachers that are providing those questions and the teachers where it's quite open and letting students come up with their own questions to follow their inquiries.
[00:05:41] Speaker A: Yes, I know that's something that's very interesting in the position paper is this range of inquiry that there isn't a single inquiry based approach.
And this idea of building up someone's knowledge and understanding through kind of constructing, actively constructing the knowledge, I think that's one of the key concepts that came through in, in the position paper.
[00:06:08] Speaker B: Absolutely, yeah. Can I add on, I'll just add on to that quickly that sometimes teachers might think, oh, I'm an inquiry teacher, that means I have to do every single lesson through inquiry, which is just not the case. Because if you look at them as being on a spectrum from that direct instruction to full open inquiry where the students are leading their learning, we can pick and choose from those approaches using intention and purpose. So what do we want the students to be able to do what's their prior knowledge, how old are they, you know, developmental stage, and then we can design intentionally around that. So we might decide, actually we're going to do a mini lesson and then we're going to use a direct inquiry approach where it's a little bit or structured inquiry approach where it's a little bit more directed in terms of what we want them to explore. And then once they've done that, well, maybe we'll go through a guided approach where they have little mini groups based on their interests and it's slightly more open. And the idea there is we're building through that kind of gradual release process, particular skills that are required for students to be successful, to be more independent in an inquiry?
[00:07:16] Speaker A: Yeah, I think that's a really good point.
I mean, is it right to think of this as like a toolbox of techniques that you might use according to what the need is, rather than being a kind of comprehensive approach?
[00:07:33] Speaker B: Absolutely. You know, and I think that's where sometimes teachers get very anxious. They go, oh, I have to change my approach. I have to do, you know, throw out all these lessons that I've used for a number of years and I have to embrace a particular new pedagogy. Well, really we're talking about enhancements to a unit or to a curriculum where we can start thinking about it differently. There might be particular areas that are best taught through a direct approach. For example, maybe you're going to teach a grammar lesson and that's going to be done through a mini lesson, through direct instruction. Completely. Fine. And then you might think, well, actually I want to students to be able to apply this in a variety of contexts. And there I'm going to use more of an inquiry based approach, encourage critical thinking, analytical thinking, as students apply rules that they've learned through direct instruction. So again, it's about mixing and matching based on intention and really the teacher knowing where they want the students to get to by the end of a period of learning.
[00:08:37] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. So many things I want to pick up. But one thing I'm going to just focus in on is we talked that about this being concept based inquiry, which may be another enhancement or technique within inquiry based learning. Is that how we should see it?
How would you define concept based?
[00:09:02] Speaker B: So I think you can think about inquiry based learning as not always being conceptual and not always leading to deep understanding. So for example, you may have a unit that students are doing and they're learning about crocodiles and they're Very excited about that unit, but they don't go down to the level of concepts and conceptual understandings to think about living things and their interactions within a habitat or an ecosystem. And so what's really important about moving from just an inquiry based approach to a concept based inquiry approach is starting to think about how we can intentionally develop concepts and conceptual understandings in students. And what we mean by that are concepts are basically abstractions. They're mental models that reflect particular ideas in society. So I mentioned that idea of a crocodile. There are other examples of living things like a bird or a salamander or a fish. What we want students to understand that these, these are all examples of a larger concept of living things and that living things have particular characteristics and that there are interactions between living things that enable them to survive in a particular environment. When we get to that point where we're no longer just thinking about the crocodile in the river, then students can transfer that to new situations and contexts. Really, when we're talking about concept based inquiry, we're talking about the strategic use of questions to help students develop concepts and conceptual understandings that transfer to new situations and contexts in the world.
[00:10:43] Speaker A: Thank you. That's fantastic. Okay, so as you say, this is a kind of enhancement, a particular approach which is focused on the development of conceptual understanding through an inquiry based learning approach. Is this something which is new? Is it being used in schools around the world? Um.
[00:11:08] Speaker B: So the idea of concept based learning was developed by Lynn Erickson and Lois Lanning kind of in the 90s and then the early 2000s.
But they didn't talk a lot about pedagogy in the books that they wrote. They talked a lot about the written curriculum, curriculum design, and how you work towards building units. And so what Rachel French and I tried to do was take their work and expand on it to show concretely what teachers can do in the classroom to be able to use an inductive approach, which means helping students see patterns and relationships in knowledge and skills that they're learning to be able to get to those higher levels of understanding through a concept based approach. It has since, as a term, been adopted by the International Baccalaureate to talk about some of their programs. They have a primary years program which is for 3 to 12 year olds, and they talk about concept based inquiry as being one aspect of the pedagogy, but the term itself is reasonably new. I would say though, that this, again, there's a long line of pedagogy, especially what extended from the 1960s, the work of Jerome Bruner the work of Joseph Novak with concept mapping. And there is a natural evolution of these ideas and sometimes they get repackaged and spoken about in a slightly different way. I would say that there's definitely aspects of concept based inquiry from the past, but the term itself is reasonably new.
[00:12:45] Speaker A: Right, right. Thank you. That's really clear. I mean that's. I think that is kind of our experience as well, that the ideas here don't feel unfamiliar, but just the kind of more explicit description and thinking through what they mean for English language teaching, for example, that feels quite new.
[00:13:11] Speaker B: I think the term explicit is probably the. It's the crux of it, which is I think teachers forever are always trying to get students to be able to think deeply about the knowledge and skills and concepts that they're exploring.
What we've seen in also some syllabi, again from the International Baccalaureate, especially at the diploma program, which is those last two years before graduation, is an intentional movement to naming specific concepts and conceptual understandings that we want students to acquire.
And that intentionality and explicitness means that as teachers we have kind of a path that we can follow, we know where we want to get to, and then we need those pedagogical moves which, you know, you've done a lot of work through the blue dot to articulate so that we can achieve that with our learners.
[00:14:06] Speaker A: Yeah, that's right. Can I just pick up on one, Aaron? That's that you talked about generalizations looking at patterns between concepts. I think in Blue Dot we call them big ideas, I think.
[00:14:19] Speaker C: Yeah, that's right. Yeah, the big ideas.
[00:14:22] Speaker A: Could you just tell us a little bit more about that? Because one of the things I found interesting about this is that it sounds quite abstract, but the way that you approach it through very series of concrete examples makes it feel much more real world than it than it might sound at first.
[00:14:40] Speaker B: I think the jargon can sometimes be confusing and there are many terms that have been used for a similar idea. So we have the idea of a big idea, a conceptual understanding, a generalization, an enduring understanding, which is used by Wiggins and Matai and some of their backwards by design work. All of these things mean the same thing, which is that we want students to make connections between two or more concepts. And these connections transfer to new situations and contexts. They have to be based in actual real life examples. And so we would always start with facts, knowledge, skills that we want students to be getting access to. And through that process of inquiry, then we move from a more concrete to a more abstract way of looking at them. So, for example, perhaps students are looking at leaders, and they study about Malala, and they study about Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. And they look at the way that leaders persevere through their challenges, and they're able to then go up to the conceptual level from that to be able to say that when experiencing challenge, leaders persevere by, I don't know, engaging with the public in order to continue their work. So we want them to get to those big ideas, but not in a kind of armchair philosophy kind of way. It should really reflect what's happening in particular case studies, mentor texts, real life news stories, things happening in their school. And it should be that synergistic thinking between the concrete and the abstract that ends in the generalization.
[00:16:32] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely.
Fiona, thinking about the English language teaching context, particularly primary, could you give some examples of big ideas that were used in Blue Dot? And also, what did you find interesting about putting big ideas into the heart of the lesson?
[00:16:50] Speaker C: Yeah, sure. So maybe it would be helpful to start rather than with bluedot, Because Bluedot, the modules are on slightly different topics. So if we start with a typical ELT unit, for example, so say animals, you might have the big idea. I mean, the concepts that you might want to be looking at would be behavior and survival and environment. These are all concepts related to the topic of animals. So then the big idea would be joining those things up. So animals, different body parts and behaviors help them to survive in their environments. So that would be a typical big idea that you're hoping that the children will come to, and you give them the facts and the information, the case studies, as Carla was saying, and they bring that together to be their big idea or another one. Animals communicate in different ways to share information that might be one, or animals move from place to place, or some animals, many animals move from place to place of place to meet their needs. So these are sort of big ideas to do with a topic that would be very typical in an ELT unit anyway.
But then, yeah, Blue Dot is a bit different because we wanted to go for more cross curricular topics in our modules. So in Blue Dot, I mean, yeah, so it's a bit different. So there would be things like we wanted to encourage students to have a very look at the world with fresh eyes by changing the types of topics. So we've got things like cooperation as a topic or perspective or diversity or choice or imitation. So the topics are a little bit different. So our big ideas are related to those topics Instead of family or animals. Or whatever might be in a more typical unit.
So, yeah, so cooperation, a big idea might be. Members of a group often cooperate by doing different jobs, for example. That would be one big idea. Or when people cooperate globally, they can share ideas and take action to help solve global problems. So, yeah, so you're looking at a concept like diversity or cooperation or choice and bringing those things together like that.
[00:19:22] Speaker A: It's really interesting because in some ways those concepts of collaboration are part of what any primary school teacher is trying to develop in their absolute students.
That's the life of a primary school teacher. And yet this is being much more explicit and aware of it and thinking of particular examples and building up those.
[00:19:44] Speaker C: Concepts and also allowing children to come to their own conclusions. So you're. You're giving them examples either through their own lived experiences. You're giving them. Sometimes you're giving them activities and they can feel the cooperation themselves or whatever. Or you're reading things, you're watching, you're listening. So they're getting the. The inputs in different ways and then you're asking them to make. To come to their own conclusions about what the benefits might be, if that's what you're focusing on. Yeah, right.
[00:20:14] Speaker A: Which relates to what Carla was saying about agency.
[00:20:17] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:20:18] Speaker A: In the whole learning process.
[00:20:20] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
[00:20:24] Speaker A: In your position paper, there's a very nice kind of explanation of a typical inquiry having seven stages.
Is this something you could just walk us through?
[00:20:37] Speaker B: So I can say that inquiry is complex, so we. We do name stages, but we view inquiry as recursive as well. So it could be that you move through a cycle and then you move backwards and then you come around again and then you might come back to the beginning. So we do name them. So the first one would be that we are engaging students. So engage. The idea there is that we're activating prior knowledge. We're engaging both the intellect and the emotions of the child to show the relevance of the learning. We might be doing some fact finding ourselves as teachers to understand what they know and how we can bring in their interests and passions into the unit. The next phase is focus. And the idea there is that as teachers, we know the range of concepts, as Fiona talked about. You know, there's concepts that are very abstract that we need students to understand in order for them to make connections between them. So if they haven't got a deep understanding of what we mean by diversity, then we need to do explicit unpacking of that concept. So in the focus phase, we choose that range of driving concepts from Our unit, maybe it's, you know, five to seven concepts, and we're doing explicit concept formation activities with students. We might do a bit of front loading of some knowledge that's required or skills that are required at the same time. But we really want them to have a deep understanding of the concepts that are required to be able to make the big ideas later in the unit. The next phase is investigate. And really this is what. It's the bread and butter of every teacher, where, you know, the students are doing work to either acquire knowledge, acquire skills. They might be doing, you know, practice of skills over time to be able to develop that fluidity with them. And that's what happens there. So it could be that that phase is longer or shorter, depending on the nature of the unit. And then we have two phases that really go together quite a lot. The first is that we want students to look for those relationships in the knowledge or skills. And they do that through a process of looking for patterns and relationships. And we might use graphic organizers or things like that for that process. And then we move to helping them to generalize. And this is where we then say, okay, you've got a graphic organizer here, like a cross comparison chart or a Venn diagram or a mind map or something that they've done some work on. Now, can you answer this big question using what you've done in the previous phase and in the generalized phase, we ask them to then articulate their own big ideas. Sometimes, depending on the age of the child, we will be their scribe. Like if you have 5 year olds or 6 year olds and they're just developing their literacy, we will ask them to tell us what they're thinking and we will write it down for them. As they develop their literacy skills and they get older, we may ask them to record it themselves in a portfolio or in a notebook.
But the idea there is that we capture those big ideas. And then lastly we move to transfer where we want the students to then take those big ideas and see how valid are they. If you went out in society and you found a. A news story related to that, would it fit? Would you need to change your idea a little bit? You know, Fiona was mentioning the ones around animals, you know, and migration of animals. So maybe they've learned about, you know, Canadian geese or some other bird that migrates and they've done a little bit of work around that to develop that big idea. Then you might say, well, let's look at the monarch butterfly or some other organism. Does our idea still work, yes or no? And then if it doesn't work, they may modify it a little bit.
[00:24:45] Speaker A: Yeah, that's really, I find that kind of model really helpful. As you say, you may not go through those steps in that simple way, but it gives you a way of thinking, well, what am I doing now this stage? Am I focusing on the, is it the focus stage? Is it the transfer stage?
And I think it helps you to think what you're doing with your student with any activity.
I was wondering, Fiona, could, could perhaps you could give us some more examples of what these questions might look like in a primary level English.
[00:25:24] Speaker C: So the different phase of the different phases that Carla was talking about. Yeah, yeah. Okay. So, so in Blue dot. Yeah, so we, we start with the, the, the engage face. It's engaged first. Yes, yes.
Okay, of course, yeah. So we would start with the engage face. You might, you might watch a quick little video or something that, that. So we, we provide some nice videos in Bluedot just to kick off the unit. We've got a big spread with some photos and, and lots of color, lots find lots of different things going on. And it just, it gets you looking at things to do with this, this topic of the, the module, which might be one of the things we talked about, choice or pattern or, or imitation or diversity or one of these things. So that's the engage phase.
[00:26:15] Speaker A: It's a bit of activating what they might already.
[00:26:18] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, it's just looking at what might come up, what they already, what they already know about this topic. Just, just checking it out and then we delve a little bit deeper in that concept in the focus phase. So like Carla says, you can't have a very meaningful discussion about a word like diversity if you don't really know what it means. So this is more than just a translation, it's delving into the deeper meaning of it. So we might give them different statements that may be completely true, maybe not so true, may be completely untrue. So I wrote down an example about strength, I think.
Yeah. So for example, how true would these statements be? You need big muscles to have a strong body or you can't bend strong materials. So are these true? Are they not true? Are they in the middle? Does it depend? So you start unpacking an idea like strength by exploring things. It could be by looking at pictures, it could be looking at statements depending on the age group and the topic. Yes. So that would be the focus phase.
And also lots of hands on activities for that thing as well for the focus phase, just to get them excited and experiencing these things for themselves a bit. Then the investigation phase. Yeah, that's the reading text, the video text, the listening texts, and so lots of different examples where these concepts are coming up. So, yeah, as Carla said, you wouldn't just do the particular geese, but you'd look at different types of animals or different situations. And in blue.it's quite varied because. Yeah, so something like imitation. We might look at someone learning to cook by imitating someone else, or we might look at criminal types of imitation. We might look at all sorts of different types of example to get to the conceptual understanding that we want.
I think that was one of the interesting things about Blue Dot is how much variety you can bring in to come to the same, you know, such varied inputs to bring students to a particular conceptual understanding. Because, as Carla says, these things are transferable. You know, that's the whole point of it. You can come to a conceptual understanding that will then work in other situations.
[00:28:55] Speaker A: I mean, one of the things you're mentioning, there is something I meant to pick up earlier, which is there are different types of questions that you might ask. And you were kind of talking there about some questions which are more factual. You might be asking some which are more conceptual about it. And some of those questions you might call provocative.
[00:29:17] Speaker C: That's right.
[00:29:18] Speaker A: Thinking about it.
[00:29:19] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, yeah, in Blue Dot, we use provocative questions at the beginning in the focus phase, then the investigation phase, where it's. It's looking at the input, reading and listening and video. So those factual. There would be factual comprehension check questions for those. But then also we. For the higher levels, anyway, we will follow that up with the discussion. Provocative questions because we're wanting them to think more deeply. It's not just about the facts on the page, is it? Or on the screen?
Yeah, so those would be provocative questions. But then, yeah, also these conceptual questions which are helping to guide them towards this final conceptual understanding that we're going to get from them. Kara, you're good on all this question stuff. Do you want to add to that?
[00:30:06] Speaker B: You explained it really well. I mean, I think that the only thing I would add to that is sometimes teachers might think, oh, I want to teach conceptually, so I'll ask conceptual questions. And they don't realize the cognitive load that comes from asking a very abstract question like, you know, how my.
How might inventors innovate based on the needs of society? It just goes over their heads. But if they had some examples that they could draw from, and they go, okay, so there was this new kind of vacuum cleaner that was created by Dyson. And then there was, you know, a special kind of human skeleton thing that people could wear if they were, you know, disabled so that they could go up and downstairs by themselves. And, oh, there's this, you know, then they can start thinking, well, what's common across the way that these inventors innovated to be able to say something generally that works for all of them. And that's a process that's not just like, I ask a conceptual question and we're done. That's really that deep work, as Hyona said, in the investigate phase, being really intentional. What are we choosing as our texts, as our examples, as our case studies, as the things that students are going to explore? So that when we get to the generalized phase and we ask a conceptual question that's more abstract, then they're able to draw upon that knowledge and that actually grounds them and allows them to be able to get to the abstract level of thinking.
[00:31:43] Speaker A: I think that's a really good point. And it also links, I think, to what you're saying earlier when you think about cognitive load. I think the activities you were talking about on the almost visual side of visual graphic organizers. Is that what they call graphic organizers and mind maps and things like that? I can see how useful those would be to build up the ideas and then have something visual in front of you so you're not having to hold too much content in your head.
[00:32:16] Speaker C: That's exactly right. So in Bluedot we've got some posters for these graphic organizers. So every, every module of inquiry has a poster and these will be different types of graphic organizers. So yeah, you can sort of update them as you go with each investigation thing, each text you read or watch, you're adding to it, but then you can come back to it at the end and it's there so that you can remember it and that. And it's all very nicely structured to help you to see those connections. Yeah, great.
[00:32:49] 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.
