Concept Foundations & Formation: Connecting big ideas within and across content areas.
Concepts are a way to organize and categorize the learning students will engage in during a unit of study.
Concepts can help to make connections within and across content areas, supporting student learning, engagement, and transfer of knowledge and skills. Identifying which concepts exist in our units of study helps to support student learning and make connections within and across content areas more explicit.
In our ever-changing world supporting modern literacies to build competencies in the knowing, doing, and thinking are just as vital as the concepts themselves. The modern literacies are the tools and strategies students use to support their learning and understanding of the concepts they are engaged in.
To learn more about identifying concepts and modern literacies within your existing units of study, explore the materials below: view the videos, follow the prompts and access the provided resources.
- Identifying Concepts
- Learning that Transfers
"Concepts are organizing ideas with distinct attributes that are shared across multiple examples. Like mental file folders, they are works we use to organize and categorize our world. They help our brains organize examples into meaningful groups based on shared attributes." p 7
To learn more about identifying concepts within your existing unit of studies, view the video below, follow the prompts and access the provided resources.
Sample Concepts Documents:
Connecting Concepts Documents:
- Modern Literacies
- Learning that Transfers
"Broadening the scope of our curriculum in intentional ways will help us center ways of knowing, doing, and thinking that are more representative of our increasingly multicultural and multimodal society. These modern literacies are the types of competencies that help students design a better future (Kalantzis et al., 2016). It is the type of learning that will eventually take students beyond our curriculum, pushing them to ask deeper questions and seek more profound answers." p 7
To learn more about identifying modern literacies within your existing unit of studies, view the video below, follow the prompts and access the provided resources.
Modern Literacies Documents:
- Resources & Next Steps
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Resources used to support the development of this professional learning opportunity:
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Learning That Transfers by Julie Stern: website and book
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Free chapter resources: https://learningthattransfers.com/chapter-resources/
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Learning That Transfers video from Julie Stern
Next Steps for continued learning:
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Conceptual Understandings*
- Teaching for Transfer - Path 1: Learning that Transfers - Acquire, Connect, Transfer
- Exploring New Literacies
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Interdisciplinary Instruction Professional Learning Schedule of Events
*Strongly recommended
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