preview

Concept Discovery Model

Decent Essays

In this lesson my students were to discover the concept of responsibility, and its attributes. The concept-based instruction allowed me to engage students in active learning, and bring the “real world” to the classroom. The lesson also allowed students to focus on understanding a broader idea of responsibility, which then was applied to various real life examples (Erickson, 2001). The lesson was carefully planned in order to meet students’ developmental needs, as well as capitalize on their interests. According to Piaget, 10 and 11- year old children are at the concrete operational stage, which means that they begin to think more logically, and symbolically, however they still may struggle with abstract thinking. Children at this stage also …show more content…

After the lesson, both students provided a deeper, and more explicit definition of “responsibility”. Their examples and non-examples of the concept, as well as the concept map include some ideas from the previous assessment, but generally these pieces of the assessment show a great variety of mature ideas. Both students also confidently pointed to almost the end part of their concept lines, indicating that they have gained more understanding of the concept of “responsibility”, which was clearly observable in students’ responses during discussions and the post interviews. This has been the first time I taught a concept discovery lesson. I am very pleased with this strategy, as it doesn’t focus on memorization of facts, or teaching some factual information, but it invites the students to bring their own thinking to the study, and transfer their understanding across various areas of their life. I wish more teachers would implement teaching concepts into their social studies curriculum, which according to Erickson (2001), is a mean to have students think critically and analytically about the new situations they

Get Access