Classification -Designing Your Lessons for Conceptual Understanding (Part 1)

In this series, we will discuss how we can design lessons for conceptual understanding. Having recently completed an upskilling course with IB, I felt we may all benefit from looking at some of these strategies and how they might look like in our PYP classrooms.

Strategy 1: Classification

   Source: Ibo.org

In this post, I will be focusing on the research-backed strategy, "classification". 

Chadwick (2009) highlights that classification helps develop conceptual understanding by allowing students to organize information, recognize patterns, and understand relationships among concepts. 

Here are some examples across several disciplines on how I have used tools to classify.

Math Class

1) In my math class (Grade 3) instead of having students simply rote learn the names of the shapes and their properties, have them sort the shapes  based on the number of sides, angles and symmetry. Even better, use the Concept Attainment Strategy (I keep returning to this strategy because it is so much fun) where instead of having students sort the shapes, you sort them without telling the students what criteria you are using. This strategy often causes excitement as it challenges their thinking and gamifies the process of concept attainment.

2) Students sort a series of numbers using a Venn or Carroll diagram. Think of a series of numbers which are multiples of 3 and 6 for instance. Without telling them how you came up with these numbers, ask the students to sort them. This task invites students to look for patterns while tapping into their knowledge of numbers and the relationships between them.

Both of these task require a lot of critical thinking which leads to conceptual understanding.

Language Focused lesson

1) The concept of Fiction and Non fiction

 In order for students to understand these two concepts, you need to encourage them to continue to classify books into these two categories whenever the opportunity arises. 

At the start of the year, instead of sorting the library books yourself, put the students to task. Briefly review what a fiction and non-fiction book is (depending on your grade level)  and let them start sorting them out. If you feel that the task will be done by some students, while others watch on, give a number of books to groups of students and ask them to sort them . Or, have a few centers where some groups are working on their handwriting or spelling in the morning (DO Now activities)  while another group sorts the library books. Once done, the books can be mixed up again, allowing the next group to sort them.

2) Phonics:

Create ai and ay word card with these phonograms and ask students to see if they can find a pattern as they classify these words. Sorting them by phonograms itself does not pose any cognitive challenge.

Students will eventually begin to point out that ay is usually used at the end of English words whereas ai is used in the middle of an English word. This realization is far more powerful than asking students to simple sort ai and ay words.

Here is another tricky concept to teach: Parts of speech

Having taught students from Grade 3 right up to Grade 8,  it is quite concerning to note that they continue to struggle with identifying this concept. The learning just does not stick.

Could it be that we are  using direct instruction and then not giving students ample time to practice and understand the concepts? Are we asking them to complete a worksheet from a text book which can be such a boring thing to do. What can we do to make classification more fun?

Introduce games: 

Create scavenger hunts where students find and classify parts of speech in  books or even outside the classroom. They love this as it involves winning! Moreover, hey get to move around instead of sitting at a desk and ploughing though an unpalatable worksheet.

Role-Playing Games: Design games where students act out the roles of different parts of speech in constructing sentences, promoting active learning and understanding.

Learning from peers:

Discussion Circles: Hold discussions where students debate and reason out why certain words belong to specific parts of speech, encouraging them to justify their thinking with evidence from texts.

Peer Teaching: Have students explain their reasoning to peers, facilitating deeper understanding through dialogue.

An inquiry task:

• Language Detective: Assign students the role of language detectives who must investigate how different words are used in, say, a chapter from a novel they are reading. They can create a report or presentation on their findings.

You could be reviewing parts of speech several times throughout the year, using a variety of these tools. 

A final great tool worth mentioning is diamond ranking. 

Have students write down their favourite books on 9 post-it notes. Now ask them to arrange the post-it notes in a way that creates a diamond formation. (1-2-3-2-1) Students are basically classifying their books from most influential to least influential. This task is not meant to be done in 5 minutes! You invite students to justify why they place the books in a certain spot in the diamond formation.

- Naini Singh

Research resources:

• Chadwick, D. (2009). Approaches to building conceptual understandings. Crown.