- Watch the concept mapping movies on BrainPOP and BrainPOP Jr. to get yourself and your class familiar with concept mapping as a teaching and learning strategy.
- Prompt students begin their concept maps by asking a meaningful question to answer. Add a “node” with the question to the concept map “canvas”. Then brainstorm everything already known about the topic.
- Begin establishing relationships between these ideas on the concept map. This is done by linking the nodes together. Students may need to re-order their nodes and/or re-size. Students may also want to use color-coding at this step to help organize the information visually.
- Students can then add to concept maps over time. As they learn new and important information, they can expand the ideas on the map. It might also be beneficial to have students watch our movie on concept mapping before they make their first map.
- You can provide additional support to students by
- assigning a partially completed “skeleton map” that provides a specific question, or nodes
- using one of the 10 pre-fabricated templates to provide guidance and structure.
