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Rusangu University
Principles & Methods of Teaching and Classroom
Management
Azerniser Cherinda-20210357
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Concept and Inquiry-Based Teaching
Objectives
 Overview of Teaching Students How to Think

 Theoretical Perspectives about Teaching Thinking

 Concept Teaching Inquiry-Based Teaching Making

Thinking Visible
 Developing Learning Environments That Promote
Thinking
 Assessing Thinking Processes and Skills
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Introdution

 Pick a concept from your teaching field for which you have good
knowledge.

 An example of this can be English in the topic “verbs” that can

be expanded into regular verbs, irregual verbs, transitive verbs,
intransitive verbs, static verbs, dynamic verbs etc.
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Contd

 Next, consider how you might teach a young child about the
concept of verbs . Using a young child rather than an older one
is good for this exercise because you will have to consider using
means other than words to teach the concept.
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 Educators and parents alike believe that teaching students how

to think is among the most important purposes of education.

 The focus of this presentation is on concept and inquiry-based

teaching, two approaches to teaching that have been developed
specifically to enhance student thinking. It will also describe a
thinking program developed for the same purpose.
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Theoretical Perspectives about Teaching Thinking

 The theoretical and empirical sup- port for teaching thinking is

extensive and covers a wide range of topics

 This work has centered mainly in cognitive views of learning and

includes the contributions of John Dewey, Jean Piaget, Jerome
Bruner, David Ausubel, and Howard Gardner, among others
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Universality of Thinking

 Do we need to teach thinking? Don’t humans think

automatically?

 Most observers, such as Nickerson (1987) and Sternberg and

Williams (2009), say yes, that humans’ capacity to think is
somewhat automatic, the same way that breathing and blinking
are automatic. It does not require instruction

 However, not everyone is an effective thinker. The goals of

instruction are to teach students how to reason and think more
clearly, more critically, and more creatively.
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Types of Thinking
Higher-Level Thinking.
 Teaching higher-level skills requires different approaches as
compared to teaching basic thinking skills or routine patterns of
behaviour

 Basic thinking skills are mainly those associated with

remembering and recalling, whereas higher-order thinking
encompasses such cognitive process as understanding,
comparing, evaluating, and creating
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Lauren Resnick (1987) defined as higher-order thinking
as:

 nonalgorithmic

 complex.

 yields multiple solutions

 involves nuanced judgment and interpretation

 application of multiple criteria

 uncertainty

 self-regulation

 imposing meaning

 effortful
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Critical Thinking

 It dates back to Socrates. This form of thinking requires the use

of analytical and evaluative cognitive processes and consists
mainly of analysing arguments for logical consistency in order to
recognize bias and fallacious reasoning.

 Sternberg (2011) cite Halpern (2007) and define critical thinking

as thinking that is “purposeful, reasoned, and goal-directed”

 It is important to be effective in this type of thinking because

students are exposed continuously to information on television
channels, Web sites, and social networks that have not been
vetted for accuracy
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 To be effective at critical thinking requires skills that will help

determine the accuracy of information and that will aid in
spotting illogical and/or fallacious arguments
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Scientific Thinking and Reasoning

 This type of thinking involves identifying problem situations,

generating and testing hypotheses, collecting data and
evidence, and drawing inferences and conclusions.

 scientific thinking consists of reasoning and drawing conclusions

based on observation and evidence
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 This type of thinking can be classified into two categories of

reasoning: deductive reasoning and inductive reasoning

 Deductive reasoning is the process of reaching conclusions

based on more general premises and goes from the general to
the specific. For example, when students are taught the law of
supply and demand they can use this law to predict what will
happen to prices if supply is increased or if demand goes up or
down
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 Inductive reasoning, in contrast, turns this process around,

and conclusions are drawn after consideration of specific
observa- tion and facts.

 This type of reasoning goes from the specific to the general

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Metacognitive Thinking

 Metacognition, or “thinking about thinking,” is the knowledge and

understanding we have about our own cognitive processes and
the capabilities we have to examine our thoughts and to monitor
what is going on.

 Important goals for teaching students how to think are to

increase their awareness of their own thinking and to develop
metacog- nitive abilities and capacities to monitor and regulate
their own learning
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Concept Teaching

 Concepts allow individuals to classify objects and ideas and to

derive rules and principles; they provide the foundations for the
idea networks (schemata) that guide our thinking.

 The learning of concepts is crucial in schools and in everyday

life because concepts allow mutual understanding among
people and provide the basis for verbal interaction.
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 Concept teaching has been developed primarily to teach key

concepts that serve as foundations for student higher-level
thinking and to provide a basis for mutual understanding and
communication
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 This approach to teaching is not designed to teach large

amounts of information to students. However, by learning and
applying key concepts within a given subject, students are able
to transfer specific learnings to more general areas
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 However, concept teaching is more than classifying objects,

nstead, concept learning involves the pro- cess of constructing
knowledge and organizing information into comprehensive and
complex cognitive structures.
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Nature of Concepts

 In teaching and learning, concepts are mental abstractions or

categories we have for things in the social and physical world.

 Concept learning is essentially “putting things into a class” and

then being able to recognize members of that class. This
requires that an individual be able to take a particular case, such
as his or her pet dog Max, and place it into a general class of
objects, in this case a class termed dog, that share certain
attributes. This pro- cess requires making judgments about
whether a particular case is an instance of a larger class.
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 Concepts are devices used to organize knowl- edge and

experiences into categories.
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Concepts Themselves Can Be Placed into Categories

 This due to the fact that different types of concepts require

different teaching strategies

 conjunctive concept- Their critical attributes are combined in an

additive manner and are always the same, Eg. An island is
surrounded by water, the sun is yellow, the earth rounds arounds
the sun.

 disjunctive concept- this types contains alternative

attributes. The concept noun is another example of a dis-
junctive concept. It may be a person, a place, or a thing, but it
cannot be all three at the same time.
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Relational concepts

 Rule structure depends on relationships. The concept aunt

describes a particular relationship between siblings and their
offspring.
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 Teachers should provide clear examples and non- examples

of what is being taught to ensure thorough understanding
of the concept.
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 Social context and culture influence the definition and

attributes of some concepts.
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Planning for Concept Teaching

 During the planning phase of a concept lesson, teachers must

make decisions about what concepts to teach and which
approach to use. They must also do a thorough job of defining
and analyzing concepts being taught and decide which
examples and nonexamples to use and how best to present
them to students during the lesson
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 The curriculum is the primary source for selecting concepts to

teach. Concepts may be embedded in textbooks, and the
teacher’s edition often provides guidance in selecting key
concepts to teach.

 A concept teaching lesson has several components. These

include the name and definition of the concept, the concept’s
attributes (some that are critical and some that are not), and
examples and nonexamples of the concept.
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 Among the various approaches a teacher can use to teach

concepts there is direct presentation and concept attainment.

 The direct presentation approach calls for teacher definition

of a concept followed by appropriate provision of examples
and nonexamples.

 The concept attainment approach entails students deriving

a concept them- selves using inductive reasoning after
being pro- vided with examples and nonexamples.
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 Complex concepts from academic subjects need to be

defined and taught appropriately for the age of the
students.
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Analysing Concepts

 Electing good examples and nonexamples of a concept is

one of the most challenging aspects of planning a concept
lesson.

 Examples serve as the connectors between the concept’s

abstraction and the learner’s prior knowledge and experiences.
Examples must be meaningful to the learner and must be as
concrete as possible.

 Examples that are very different from each other will enable
students to focus on common attributes of the concept.
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Visual aids and pictures have been shown to greatly
facilitate student understanding of complex concepts.
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Conducting Concept Lessons

 There are four generally aggred phases in conducting a concept

teaching lesson.
Phase 1: Clarify aims and establish set. Teacher explains the aims and procedures for the
lesson and gets students ready to learn.
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Phase 2: Input examples and nonexamples. In the direct presentation approach, teacher
names the concepts, identifies the critical
attributes, and illustrates with examples and
nonexamples.
In concept attainment, examples and
nonexamples are given, and students inductively
arrive at the concept and its attributes.

Phase 3: Test for attainment. Teacher presents additional examples and

nonexamples to test students’ understanding of
the concept. Students are asked to pro- vide their
own examples and nonexamples of the concept.

Phase 4: Analyze student thinking processes and Teacher gets students to think about their own
integration of learning. thinking processes. Students are asked to
examine their decisions and the consequences of
their choices. Teacher helps students integrate
new learning by relating the concept to other
concepts in a unit of study.
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Inquiry-Based Teaching

 Inquiry-based teaching is another instructional approach that has been developed

for the purpose of teaching students how to think. Inquiry-based teaching rests, for
the most part, on the same theoretical base as previously described for concept
teaching and will not be repeated here. The model was influenced by the early
work of John Dewey (1916) and of Jerome Bruner (1960, 1961). Mid-twentieth
century curriculum revisionists in the sciences, history, and the social sciences.

 (Fenton, 1966; Schwab, 1966; Suchman, 1962) also helped define how inquiry-
based teaching is used in classrooms today. More recently, Lowen and Rikers
(2011), Magnusson and Palincsar (1995), Meyer (2004), and individuals associated
with the BSCS Science Instructional Model (2009) have extended and refined
earlier approaches to inquiry-based teaching. The sections that follow describe
procedures and guidelines for planning and conducting effective inquiry-based
lessons.