Educators Technology defines Concept mapping as “a learning strategy that involves visualizing relations between concepts and ideas using graphical representations.” (https://www.eucatorstechnology.com/2020/04/concept-mapping-in-education-teachers.html) This learning tool has been used for decades. They are intended to focus the subject being taught and can be used for more than just curriculum.

Think about when you were learning English (for English speaking countries) and you did sentence diagramming. This was a form of concept mapping. The Educators technology site provided the following concept map to illustrate, concept mapping.

Concept mapping in Education

As you can see, this is a visual representation of a concept map.

Concept maps can be as complex or as simple as you would like to make them. Going back to sentence diagramming. By diagramming the sentence, it gives the learning a visual representation of the sentence to all them to understand placement of the verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs and so on, to properly construct a sentence in English. Here is a basic example of a sentence diagram:

Sentence diagram

I am sure you can imagine that these types of diagrams can get complicated, however, being able to visualize how the sentence is diagrammed, helps you to learn the purpose of each word and its importance to the sentence. This allows the learning to deeper understand the subject and the concepts around it.

On the simpler side, concept mapping can be used as a quick organization tool. My mom used to teach speech to high school students. She taught them to concept map their speech so that they would not be reading from note cards and still stay focused on their topic. The idea is to draw a ‘bug.’ Here is an example that incorporates two different ‘bugs’ but I wanted to show you the concept is not limiting.

Bug diagram

As you can see, this is a simple drawing and is intended to be so. The body of the ‘bug’ is your main topic, or thesis statement. You can have as many ‘legs’ as you like, but you’ll want a minimum of two. For debate class, my mom insisted on a minimum of six ‘legs’ to prove a point. The students always knew that they would not be able to speak to all six legs, but the additional legs were used for rebuttal material. The idea was that this kept the teacher, or speaker, focused and not ramble for long periods of time.

So, as a teacher, or instructor, think about when you design a curriculum for a class. A concept map will help you focus the lesson or lessons. The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga recommends using a concept map to allow you multiple abilities:

1. By constructing a concept map, you can see areas that appear trivial, that you may want to drop from the lesson/course.
2. You can discover the themes you want to emphasize.
3. You can understand how students may see or organize knowledge differently from you, which will help you better relate to the students and to challenge their ways of thinking.
4. The mapping process can help you identify concepts that are key to more than one discipline, which helps you move beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries.
5. Concept maps help you select appropriate instructional materials. You can construct a map that incorporates teaching strategies as well as time and task allocations for various parts of the course.
6. You can visually explain the conceptual relationships used for your objectives in any course.
7. You can facilitate efforts to reconceptualize course content.
8. Rather than being a traditional course plan that assumes students will integrate learning, concept maps depict the intentions of faculty00 the integration you expect to occur.
9. You can use concept maps to provide a basis for discussion among students and to summarize general course concepts.
10. Concept maps support a holistic style of learning.
11. Mapping concepts can increase your ability to provide meaningfulness to students by integrating concepts
12. Concept maps can increase your potential to see multiple ways of constructing meaning for students.
13. Mapping the concepts can help you develop courses that are well-integrated, logically sequenced, and have continuity.
14. Concept maps help “teachers design units of study that are meaningful, relevant, pedagogically sound, and interesting to students.”
15. Concept maps help “the teacher to explain why a particular concept is worth knowing and how it relates to theoretical and practical issues both within the discipline and without.”

(https://www.utc.edu/walker-center-teaching-learning/teaching-resources/cm-cd.php)

The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga website also offers these basic steps to making a concept map:

1. Write down major terms or concepts about a topic.
2. Identify the most general, intermediate, and specific concepts.
3. Begin drawing the concept map:
4. Concepts are circled
5. Place the most general concepts at the top
6. Place intermediate concepts below general concepts
7. Put specific concepts on bottom
8. Draw lines between related concepts.
9. Label the lines with “linking words” to indicate how the concepts are related.
10. Revise the map.

In summary, concept mapping is a great way for the teacher to organize their thoughts and focus their course to offer the students a clear way to learn. It also allows the students to visualize the subjects which could allow them to remember the topic and supporting data around the subject in an easier fashion.