The most common high school class design we see is a heap of facts—e.g. “The Battle of Manassas was the first battle in the Civil War”—doing their best to support a handful of enduring understandings: high-level takeaways that students will ideally remember long after a course ends. Facts and enduring understandings are both important—but what’s often missing from curricula is the middle layer, the conceptual level.
And it’s this layer that keeps the edifice from collapsing. Concepts do the hard work of “middle management”; they give structure to facts that might otherwise seem discrete and unrelated and bring abstract enduring understandings into concrete focus.
If introduced correctly, concepts are what make learning stick. They enable students to recognize patterns in what they’re learning, and thus to organize and decipher the world around them.
Today, we want to share one of our go-to curriculum design practices, which we use in almost every lesson plan we create: introducing a powerful principle or concept, then asking students to apply it.
Although this structure may sound incredibly simple, we’ve found it invaluable in our quest to create lasting learning and help students make connections between their education and the real world. We’ve also found it rare when reviewing high school lesson plans.
Here’s how we get the most out of this structure, which can take two forms:
1. Students generate their own examples of the powerful principle(s) or concept(s)
Let’s zoom in on a day of the political science unit of our Social Sciences for Social Problems course. Before class, students watch a talk by political scientist Michael Munger, in which he introduces the “five binaries” that political scientists commonly analyze. For clarity, we’ll look at one of these binaries, “Authority vs. Anarchy,” which concerns the level of power the state has over individual citizens.
After engaging students in a retrieval activity to ensure they understand what each of the binaries means, we move to application. The binary activity asks students to, in small groups, discuss and jot down questions, historical events, and/or historical figures that relate to each of the five binaries.
This activity led to some of the most fluid and engaging conversations I’ve witnessed as a teacher, entirely sparked by the questions students generated. For “Authority vs. Anarchy”, students posed questions like: “How does the definition of protected speech vary by country?” “Which international frameworks and laws should individual nations always uphold? Which can they break, and under what conditions?” and “How much power can a government have before it infringes on the people’s liberty?”
While the structure of this activity was straightforward, the conversations it led to were not. Students left the class with a far deeper understanding of what the five binaries actually are and how deeply relevant they are to the world around us—a result of the fact that we designed the class to test their knowledge by asking them to actively generate examples. Going forward, students can use the binaries as lenses through which to understand current events, thus going beyond a headline understanding of social and political issues.
2. Students identify examples of the powerful principle(s) or concept(s) “in the wild”
On the “Introduction to Economics” day of our 10-day Social Sciences for Social Problems course, students read the following definition of economics:
Economics is the study of decision-making and its consequences, both on the individual and aggregate level. More specifically, it is the study of how economic actors— people who exchange goods and services on the market— decide between trade-offs in a constrained and uncertain environment (i.e. one in which resources are scarce and where the reactions of our counterparts are unknown). In deciding between trade-offs, economic actors consider their incentives (any personal motivation they might have to make a certain choice), preferences (a liking for one alternative over the others), and access to information. The constrained and uncertain environment in which economic actors make decisions as well as people’s decisions are mediated by institutions (institutions are establishments such as laws and trade agreements that determine the “rules of the game”).
This definition includes five key concepts that students might previously have been unfamiliar with: economic actors, trade-offs, incentives, preferences, and institutions. After reading the definition, we ask students to generate concrete examples of each of these concepts on a collective document and then unpack these examples as a group. This past summer, the examples students came up with included “corporate CEOs” (economic actor), “deciding on which job to take when one offers better health insurance and the other offers more vacation days” (trade-off), and “criminal laws and punishments” (institution).
Once students had a clear understanding of what these concepts meant, we took the next step: asking them to identify examples of these concepts “in the wild” (at work in a text). Students read excerpts from two popular economics texts: Nudge and Portfolios of the Poor. We then split them into groups, each assigned to focus on one of the two texts. Each group filled out a table that prompted them to consider: what are the economic actors, trade-offs, incentives, preferences and institutions that are relevant to this book or were necessary for the authors to consider as they conducted their research? We then discussed the examples students discovered as a full group.
Student responses from summer ‘22.
This activity helped students understand initially abstract economic concepts in increasingly concrete ways. Additionally, the text analysis portion of the activity brought students to a clearer understanding of the goal of each economic text and what it illuminated about a social problem. For example, Portfolios of the Poor argues that we need to closely examine the lived experiences of those living on less than $1 a day—treating them as individual economic actors rather than abstracting them to data points—in order to have a complete picture of what modern-day poverty looks like.
Focusing the Introduction to Economics lesson around these five key concepts ultimately enabled students to reach a lasting understanding of the unique contributions and significance of economics as a discipline. This was pleasantly surprising for my students, many of whom previously thought of economics as boring, inaccessible, and irrelevant to issues they cared about. (The most common misconception high school students have is that economics is mostly about money and the stock market.)
We need to prioritize building the conceptual layer into high school curricula not only because concepts make learning stick, but also because they enable and motivate students to go beyond a superficial understanding. When students are able to ground their learning in concepts that bridge the gap between the classroom and the world, they can think critically about the problems our society faces and how to best address them.