Engaging Students With Concept Mapping Activities

Post a 2-3 paragraph summary of the 3-5 ideas you explored for how you could use Concept Mapping within your future classroom. Give your specific examples.

With this activity, I was able to explore lots of different ways that I can use Concept Mapping within my future classroom. This method is defined by dictionary.com as "a tangible way to display how your mind sees a particular topic."
The most obvious of these realizations was that Concept Mapping can come in handy when my students are trying to organize their own ideas. Regardless of the subject, concept mapping is a great way for students to organize their thought processes because it provides an opportunity to look at information in a different way. A child can easily map out the main ideas for a story that they are writing or the outline of a story that someone else has written. In these ways, a concept map can be highly useful.


Discuss what you see as the impact of the use of Concept mapping might have on student learning within your future classroom? Give some details to support your statements.

Within my future classroom, I can see that Concept Mapping would have a major impact on my student learning for several reasons. I believe that when students are first beginning how to communicate and write their own stories, that it is important for them to be able to see a visual break-down of what they want to happen in the story. For this reason, it is important to have some form of concept map, where they can write down the events that they want to happen in the beginning, middle, and end of a story. This helps the students organize their thoughts into a way that is easy for them, their classmates, and I to follow. Another way that this can become useful is when students then advance into organizing and putting their information into paragraph form, which they would also find easier to do if they are given the opportunity to map out their thoughts. In the classroom that I have my practicum with, they are beginning to learn about paragraphs and write them in a way that begins with an introduction, middle, and ending statement. To help with this, my teacher gives them each a sheet of paper that is divided into thirds and has them write out ideas for what they want to say in each part. In these ways, I have seen very beneficial ways for concept mapping to help improve student learning, which I will continue in my future classroom.


Discuss at least 2 criteria that you would use to decide whether or not Concept Mapping activities would be part of a lesson for your students.

Two criteria that I would use when deciding whether or not Concept Mapping activities would or should be a part of my lesson would be:
a) Sit down and read through my lesson. Decide what my main target for the assignment is. If concept mapping isn't a direct variable in the students' advancement toward this target, it's probably not important enough to spend the time on.
b) Think about my allowed time. If I don't have the time to fit in a huge concept mapping section of the lesson, I may need to alter my plan and maybe do a shared learning experience where my whole class makes an example concept map.