Identify a concept that is often misunderstood in your discipline. Can you think of an analogy that can help make the concept make sense to students?

  • Does this analogy take into account where students are coming from in their previous experiences?
  • Or how could you break that concept down into bite-size chunks so your students can more easily digest that harder-to-acquire information?

To do:

  1. Re-state your misunderstood concept and then identify and expand on how you would explain your concept through an analogy.
  2. Explain the analogy in writing and include a visual metaphorical representation of this analogy (perhaps use the Curator Module Consider This activity as a guide to finding an image).
  3. After you make your submission, save the web address to your response (found in the green confirmation box) so you can use it later for your badge submission form.

This activity is part of the Prior Knowledge section of the Teacher for Learning Module.

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207 Responses for this Activity

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    2 Responses to “Misunderstood”

    1. Martina Kolodzey

      I teach CLB 3 4, and there are certain things that a level four student should be able to do that a level three student isn’t expected to do just yet. For both cases, the concept of questions is very difficult both in terms of answering and creating questions. In level three, it is expected that a student can read a short passage and answer simple comprehension questions. What I find is that my students will answer the question by rewriting the sentence from the text that contains key words from the question. That means that their answer will likely include much more information than needed to answer the question. The problem with them doing this is that I can see that they know how to find the answer, but I cannot see if they know what the answer actually is. For example, the question might be: When is Theresa’s doctor’s appointment? The sentence they choose to answer the question with says: Theresa must remember to bring her health card to her doctor’s appointment at 3pm. The student has taken the first step in finding the answer in the text, but didn’t take the second step in giving just the information that was asked for. The level four student, needs to be able to formulate questions. This is another concept that is difficult, but works along the same lines. My solution takes a few steps.
      1. Make sure the students know all the question words and what the question words are looking for, who – a person, what – a thing or concept, where – a place, etc.
      2. Read a short text.
      3. Look at the comprehension questions.
      4. First, underline the answers in the text, write which number question they correspond with.
      5. Look at the wording of the question. Rearrange the wording of the question to start answering the text.
      6. Go back to the underlined text for that question, and take only the what you need to answer the question.
      7. Do this for a number of questions.
      8. Part two – Take a full sentence from the text.
      9. Figure out what questions we can ask, for example: who, what, where, etc…
      10. Use the previous example on how to write the answer to the question, and reverse it to show how to formulate the question.

      Reply

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