CBCI For the Thinking Classroom

Brady McCune

There is interesting rhetoric that has integrated into mainstream media of “facts not feelings” in which people try to argue that the evidence they present as facts should be taken as the end all be all. However, many “facts” are presented in a way that dulls the complexity of situations and events and ultimately are not enough to stand alone. There has been a shift in schools across America in which knowledge of specific facts is valued over students’ ability to think critically. The regurgitation of these facts is assessed on state assessments which in turn can affect the funds given to a said school. However, students are rarely taught or assessed in critical thinking skills, and I believe this to be a major reason if you ask American K-12 students if they like school, the kindergartens will say yes, and most others will say no. Concept-Based Curriculum and Instruction aims to change the narrative and the intention of teaching and learning. It is an idea that aims to have students use their minds, and their own personal intellect to develop skills that are essential for twenty-first-century living and problem-solving (Erickson, Lanning, French 13). Concept-Based Curriculum is moving past using facts as an end-all-be-all and moving towards focusing on concepts in depth and developing skills such as inquiry, synergistic, and critical thinking.

I personally have fallen victim to the dangers of America’s failing curriculum. Let me take you back about sixteen years ago, I was crying and pleading to my mom every single day “Please just let me stay home, I don’t want to go to school!” My mom thought that I was being bullied by other kids, but in reality, I was being failed by my school and my teachers. I was a very gifted third-grade student, with reading and writing levels of high school students. I had won every fair and bee our school had, Geography Bee, Spelling Bee, and Science Fairs, even beating out my older brother in some. I loved learning new things, and I was a sponge. This extended into sports and music as well. I was learning how to play three sports, and excelling at them. My mom was a very talented pianist and taught me how to play, and I was a natural. Every single thing I could learn how to do, I wanted to. However, about four months into the school year, my parents got a truancy letter in the mail, and we had to sit before a board that would discuss the consequences. The board came down with the decision that they would file a plea in court against my parents, essentially if I missed another day of school my parents could get in big trouble. My parents couldn’t recognize the problem, they would ask “Why do you hate school, you are so smart! It should be easy for you!” Within that quote lies the problem, school was way too easy for me. My teacher would give us reading, and packets that asked specific questions about what happened in the reading, but never had us connect it to other ideas we had learned. What took my classmates hours, took me minutes. I would finish math packets before she was done giving instructions. I was so bored in school because I was never using my brain. I would spit out “facts” that I learned and was able to do so very quickly, that I had nothing to do for hours during the school day. I hated school because I was never challenged and I was just trying to make it through so I could learn something new when I got home. 

Eventually, I found something that I loved, teaching. I began tutoring kindergartens with language and reading skills as a third grader and I flourished. It gave me a purpose, taught me compassion, and applicable skills to the real world. It is still with me today, and my experience as a tutor pushed me into teaching later in my life. The main idea of CBCI is for students to make meaning of their learning, and I keep third-grade me in mind when crafting lessons and working through curriculum. I like to ask myself, “Am I making this lesson so students can memorize this for the test? Or can they actually use it?” If it is yes to the first question, I rework my lesson to make it applicable to their life. One way to do this is by covering concepts in depth, rather than covering a vast amount of topics at the surface level, or in other words depth over breadth (Erickson, Lanning, French 16). 

Our current curriculum is broken, as teachers and students are forced to regurgitate facts on a state test rather than teaching them to understand concepts that are applicable to the twenty-first-century world. To fix the broken curriculum America needs a paradigm shift, we need to shape young minds to think critically and for themselves rather than just creating robots that spit out facts, we already have AI, Google and so many other things that do that. Concept Based Curriculum and Instruction is an answer to this problem, however, it is not just a thing that happens overnight. There needs to be discussions about the synergy between knowledge of facts and skills, why we are learning, and what we aim to learn. It can happen, and I have hope that it will happen. 

Action

One thing that I can do to help this come about is doing it in my own school, and I will start with a unit plan focusing on the question/concept “How can people transform society for the better?” I will have my students research multiple social movements across time and around the world, and we will focus on why people were trying to transform society, how they were doing it, and what actually happened as a result of the movements. We will then open up discussions by focusing on things in the student’s lives, and the different roles they play in the world. Who are the students, and who are they in relation to others and in relation to places/things. They will try to describe these, and then begin to have discussions on what their ideal communities look like on multiple levels: school, town, state, country, and world. After this, they will look at where these communities do not live up to their ideas by naming and describing the issues. They will then pick one issue that they see within one of their communities, and use the concepts they learned from the social transformation research to make a proposal to leaders of the community to solve the issue. This issue can be micro or macro, as long as they are applying the skills and concepts learned throughout the unit on their proposal, they will pass. The processes of CBCI that the students will use are discussions, writing prompts, problem-solving, and research. All these concepts/processes will create a CBCI unit that will make third-grade me very happy. 

TCE Thresholds and CBCI

CBCI is a great way to foster TCE threshold concepts and for the purpose of this post, I will give two. The first threshold is that curriculum is more than standards, textbooks, or courses of study. As I have discussed previously, human beings are meant to think and in CBCI teachers and students are encouraged to do so, and the curriculum should contain some of the following components: 

• Questioning what students learn in schools, and what is the purpose of that learning. 
• Focusing on what teachers need to know about their content areas, their students, and themselves. 
• What is the role of the school in the community?
• Who are the teachers and students in their communities?

The next is that teachers and students have empowerment/agency. Teachers with no agency foster students with no agency and a trend of powerless communities. CBCI allows for discussions about power structures, expectations and creates opportunities for students and teachers to be empowered. Because of this, students and teachers who are engaged in CBCI become increasingly more involved in their communities, and become problem solvers for those communities (hence the reason for my Unit Plan). In my school, I do feel empowered through my ability to teach freely but there is an increasing pressure to be lock step with other teachers, and creating common assessments (multiple choice tests). This pressure is not only felt by me but then transfers to my students, who feel pressured to perform well on those assessments. This pressure takes away from a carefully co-constructed classroom environment that fosters agency and empowerment. The idea of student voice and choice is at the forefront of my classroom as the students construct a classroom constitution in which they make the rules of their class, and set the expectations for the year. Using a CBCI method gives students real power to craft a classroom in which they can grow as people. 

Social Media Posts are in the Picture – Instagram and Twitter with the QR Code

• Blog Posts
• https://www.casieonline.org/post/concept-based-learning-part-1-three-dimensional-curriculum-for-lifelong-learning
• https://www.thinkconceptually.com/blog/a-shift-towards-concept-based-inquiry#comments

Sources

Erickson, L, Lanning, L, & French, R. (2017). Concept-Based Curriculum and Instruction for the Thinking Classroom End Edition). Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.