Thursday, February 21, 2013

Teaching concepts: Eliciting the 4 concepts in 1-point perspective

As part of the professional development (PD) exercise in my current institution, I recently volunteered to be a participant in a PD sharing session on Conceptual Teaching. It definitely is an elucidating session for me, and what I took away from that session is a clearer idea of what concepts are, and how a teacher can deepen the students' learning through the idea of teaching concepts.

Well, certainly teaching concepts in the classrooms is not an easy exercise on its own, as it does require a certain significant degree of preparation and set of examples, and counter-examples, of what concepts are. But what I do appreciate most is the idea that for learning to be really deep and significant, the ability to deepen the students' conceptual understanding, and then perhaps being able to get students to apply and transfer these concepts into other contexts, is THAT thing that would be the epitome of what effective LEARNING is all about. If students do not just merely regurgitate nor memorise, but more importantly, being able to have a deep understanding of the materials being taught, and then, being able to apply them into other contexts, that is perhaps the ideal model of what learning is all about.

I was initially a bit skeptical about how to apply Conceptual Teaching into a topic or into content areas that is primarily skills-centric, but nonetheless, being the adventurous me, I decided to give it a shot! Loo and behold, I did manage to work on developing concepts on what 1-point perspective is all about, or not. Here are the 4 concepts that I've managed to elicit from my interactions from my 2 classes of Year 1's (12-13 year olds). Here are the 4-concepts, taken from the white board.

4 key concepts to define a 1-point perspective drawing, plus an optional
working concept, for my students
What do you think of these 4 concepts? Are these enough to define that a perspective sketch is 1-point, versus one that is not? Let me hear your thoughts.

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