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Chapter 4 Differentiation with Concepts/Issues/Themes Dimension
Info-booklet : Differentiation for Gifted Learners in Practice
Chapter 4 Differentiation with Concepts/Issues/ Themes Dimension
Dr. Joyce VanTassel-Baska
4.1 Concepts/ Issues/ Themes Dimension The third and last dimension of the Integrated Curriculum Model (ICM) is the concepts, issues and themes emphasis. As a curriculum element for gifted learners, it seeks to elevate the level of reading and discourse about the world of knowledge to a higher plane of abstraction, focusing on ideas that may be framed in concepts, real world issues or problems and themes found in history, literature and the arts. Indeed, teaching to concept development has been lauded as an important way to enhance learning for all students. It facilitates the teaching of standards in all subjects, ensuring that gifted students go through the standards but are provided important extensions of those standards at more advanced levels in the world of ideas. Teaching conceptual schema, moreover, produces important long term learning (NRC, 2002). Some research even suggests that teaching conceptually is superior to skillbased instruction. Application of concepts to units of study Although the Center for Gifted Education at The College of William and Mary has published an array of curriculum units in Language Arts and Social Studies, all of which illustrate a concept-based approach, we will use as an example a set of three Language Arts units that, taken together, provide a cohesive concept-based curriculum for the middle grades. These three units are entitled Patterns of Change, Autobiographies, and The 1940s: A Decade of Change (CFGE, 2010). The units are structured around the concept of change, and look at this concept first through the lens of cyclic change in novels, then change in a person through the study of autobiographies, then change during a historical time period. Although they are language arts units, they are appropriate for a larger interdisciplinary curriculum because key lessons pull in the study of history, music, visual arts, individual lives, and personal reflection. Each unit uses visual organisers to help students track the concept of change as it is shown in various media. A “change matrix” employed by each unit helps students track cyclic change in novels for Patterns of Change, helps students look at different aspects of change within autobiographies for Autobiographies, and shows changes in art and music over a historical period of fifty years for The 1940s. A central strategy for developing a concept The teaching to key concepts is as important as the use of them to organise curriculum. A set of fundamental ideas about concept teaching follows: Principle #1 Students must focus on several examples of the concept.
Con cep ts/ I s suofethe Name 25 examples s/ concept of change. They may be abstract (e.g. the aging process) or Thehair). specific (e.g. gray mes Sample activity:
Con cep Principle #2 ts/ I Students must note how the examples vary and yet are still examples of the concept.ssu e Them s/ Sample activity: es Discuss in small groups the similarities and differences among the examples of change. Create categories that fit each example and defend them to the group. Principle #3 Students must be able to cite non-examples and describe how they resemble examples, but more importantly, how they differ from them. Sample activity: In your small group, name at least six examples of things that do not change. Defend your choices to the class. Principle #4 Students must generalise that what is alike about all the examples they have examined is also true of all other examples of the concept. Sample activity: Create 3-5 generalisations that apply to all of your examples but not the counter examples. Begin the generalisation statements with “Change is …” Principle #5 Students must gather and verify information as to the concept-relevant characteristics of each individual example and non-example. Sample activity: Research three examples from your list of things that change and three from your list of things that do not change. Describe how the process of change or constancy applies to each. Discuss your findings in your group. Asking students to construct their own understanding of the concept deepens students’ appreciation for the power of concepts in thinking about how the world works. Terrorism, for example, becomes more understandable if we see it in terms of a system made up of organised global cells rather than just random acts. Understanding change allows us to grapple with its reality in our lives as we observe it working in many different facets of our world.
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