How can you choose what concepts are right for your teaching?

Honour the Curriculum

The concepts a teacher needs to use in order to honour the curriculum, can largely be found in the academic standards at each grade level subject. The concepts you choose to utilize will heavily depend on your professional choices, and be influenced by content, the age, experiences, and diversity among the students, and your personal goals and values for teaching. What is most important is that you, the teacher, are invested in helping your students explore the concepts that you choose.

Curate through Concept Choice

You have options in the kinds of concepts you choose to use with your students. For example, you can choose broad, universal concepts (macro-concepts) that transcend subject areas. These universal concepts often have complex social implications that can lead to critical and reflective thinking among your students. You might also choose content-specific concepts that honour the curriculum and provide depth to the learning (micro-concepts). These can be a great place to start, especially if you feel this approach to instruction might take some getting used to.

You might also consider choosing a set of learning or thinking skills that you want your students to master by the time they leave your class, like ‘persistence’ or ‘intercultural awareness.’

Whatever types of concepts you choose to integrate into instruction, consider ways that you can make them visible in your class’s physical space as well as in the learning activities you plan.