Times have changed, yet educational strategies in many classrooms have not – and students are not reaching their full potential because of it. Reaching beyond skill drills and memorization, educators are tapping into new strategies that actually engage learners and allow them to retain information, including CBCI.
What is CBCI?
Concept-Based Curriculum and Instruction is an educational framework wherein units are designed with a focus on concepts and deeper conceptual understanding across subjects instead of remote memorization and surface-level curriculum. It is a model that allows for knowledge to be transferred as students dive into their own experiences and individual thinking to dig through to deeper levels of understanding rather than superficial and fleeting knowledge, allowing them to better read the world around them. To learn more about what goes into CBCI and its benefits, this blog post is an excellent read!
Why CBCI? Main points behind CBCI
- CBCI provides students with more than surface knowledge by providing them opportunities to engage with the topic in a variety of meaningful ways to not only strategically process texts and information, but create a synergy into the understanding of concepts within, ensuring a deeper and long-lasting understanding.
- It encompasses learning that develops the conceptual mind, helping students to discern patterns, make connections, and develop deeper understandings that can then be transferable to other aspects of learning. Students are able to bring in their own thoughts and experiences to the factual study, leading them to make personal meaning and connections out of what they are covering. Thus, they can easily transfer this knowledge to other situations, environments, and settings by increasing their creative thinking to become better problem solvers.
- In CBCI, teachers do not generally teach principles and concepts as facts in order to give the opportunity for the student themselves to think through to deeper levels of comprehension and not do the thinking for them by providing them straight away with the answers. As such, it provides avenues of critical thinking that is self-directed and self-disciplined.
Unit Plan Overview and Challenges
For the final project of the course, I want to base my unit around prejudice, identity, and civil rights. Through the integration of children’s books and poetry in a linked text set, my goal is to develop a language arts unit for 5th grade students encompassing issues of race, identity, and bullying in a historical and modern context. The goal would be to use both a critical literacy lens along with the conceptual lens we are learning about in this course to spark discussions on empathy and social justice as well as develop knowledge on macroconcepts such as discrimination and identity through topics such as the Civil Rights Movement, the Tulsa Race Massacre, and more. I want to keep student discussion at the forefront of this unit, and as such, develop the unit plan in a way that I would have various literature resources on hand to supplement student discussion as a foundation for the unit, but be able to adapt and be flexible as students hone in on topics that they feel more passionate about. Some challenges I foresee while developing this unit plan is how to keep student-led discussion as a priority and not fall back on direct instruction. Another challenge I can imagine is how to organize the unit in a way that is cohesive and touches on all of the concepts that could come up, such as privilege, identity, discrimination, etc.
TCE Thresholds and Alignment to CBCI
- Curriculum is more than standards, textbooks, or courses of study
- CBCI is a learning process that dives beyond the basic facts and surface-level curriculum to deeper conceptual understanding.
- CBCI engages learners by providing them opportunities to bring in their own connections and experiences, not just introduce new standards with no relation to them.
- Students have the opportunity to bring up their own interests in CBCI, extending their thinking beyond textbooks to current-event issues that are of relevance to them.
- Even in my short experience in a classroom, I have witnessed firsthand how sticking to traditional curriculum does not lead to retention of information, and thus no actual knowledge is acquired. CBCI presents an opportunity for students to be engaged and actually learn valuable concepts that can stick with them in other avenues of their lives, not only during one course of study. Especially at my previous school with a completely Hispanic population and large majority of ELs, students crave opportunitites to integrate their culture and unique backgrounds into the classroom, and CBCI provides just that.
- For more information on how standards, facts, and skills play into CBCI and education, read this blog post!
- Social justice questions power and how institutionalized powers are enacted in specific instances that privilege some and marginalize others
- With inquiry-based strategies in CBCI, students use a conceptual and critical lens to analyze institutionalized powers throughout their learning, whether that is in the literature they read, including their textbooks, or in other types of media, such as advertisements, movies, commercials and more.
- CBCI incorporates social justice action wherein students can take charge and make a change in situations they see a need for through actions like petitions, drafting letters, and more.
- CBCI units tackle topics and concepts encompassing issues of power in a social justice lens by introducing various perspectives within each concept and topic.
- Given my experience at a Title 1 school, I wish I had focused more effort on integrating social justice issues within the scope of my classroom and helped my students develop a conceptual and critical lens to see the world around them and encourage them to spark change. A benefit of CBCI I want to make the most of in the future, regardless of what school I end up at, is to incorporate spark student-led discussion on social justice issues that are pertinent to them and raise their awareness.
- More information on the importance of a social justice lens can be found in this enriching article by Edutopia!
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Hi there, I like your unit idea! I think that you could keep student led discussion at the forefront based on some guiding questions. Maybe even have students create questions that they would want answered back then or in modern times. I think if students are curious and you foster that, engagement should rise.
Thank you for your feedback! I love your idea of having students generate the questions themselves, I think that would work wonderfully in allowing them more autonomy throughout the unit but also have a purpose and focus throughout discussions. Thank you so much!
As a social studies teacher I think your idea to get a discussion going about prejudice, identity, and civil rights early is wildly valuable! I often struggle with my high school students getting them to understand that the way things are isn’t how they HAVE to be! So I think that is wonderful, have you considered coupling this unit with social studies? I always felt like a civic lens was lacking in much of my curriculum and this seems like a great way to bring that in. I also wonder about your ELA standards. Obviously I am a high school teacher so 5th grade is foreign territory for me, but you talk a lot about the concepts you want them to gain and discuss from their reading, but very little about the reading strategies you will be teaching to encourage this understanding from students.
Thank you so much for your feedback! Yes, I definitely think this would pair well with social studies as well, I had originally thought about it being an ELA unit principally because of the children’s literature (across multiple genres) that I wanted to include as the main guiding parts of the unit. Being from Florida, I’d have to read up more on ELA standards here in Ohio to see which would work with the unit!
I really love the direction you’re taking with this unit on prejudice, identity, and civil rights. Integrating children’s books and poetry is such a great way to make these topics approachable for 5th graders, and using a critical literacy lens to encourage empathy and social justice discussions is spot on.
I think one of the strengths of your approach is giving students a voice in the discussion. Allowing them to dive deeper into the topics they’re passionate about can really foster critical thinking and personal connections to the material. It’s true that keeping student-led discussions at the forefront can be tricky, but maybe focusing on structured group discussions, could help ensure that conversations remain student-driven while staying on track.
As for keeping the unit cohesive, perhaps breaking the unit down into thematic sections, where each theme (like identity or privilege) is tied to specific texts, could give you flexibility while ensuring that all major concepts are covered. This way, you’d still have room for organic conversations while keeping the overall structure intact.
Your unit sounds incredibly thoughtful and relevant. I’m excited to see how it comes together!
Thank you so much for your response! I appreciate your advice on how to break down the unit to keep it more organized and cohesive, it would definitely help to make sure discussions don’t go off on tangents and keep them more focused on a particular lens.