Jennifer Gonzalez, Cult of Pedagogy, How and Why to Use Concept Maps (October 12, 2025).
I have a new, rich addition to my resources on teaching and learning; it’s a website called Cult of Pedagogy. The referenced post explains how concept maps can strengthen and deepen students’ learning, particularly their understanding of the relationships among the concepts they are learning. Here is a small excerpt to tempt you to read the full article:
. . . Representing ideas visually is something many humans do by instinct; when we go to explain something to someone else, it’s not uncommon for us to grab something to write with and say, “Here, let me show you.”
Sometimes the concept itself is already visual — like a diagram of a simple machine or a rough plan for a garden. Other times, we can use visuals to represent ideas, like a flow chart that illustrates how a process works. One of the ways we can do this is with concept maps.
A concept map is a graphic organizer or visual representation of knowledge . . . Key concepts are put into nodes, which look like boxes or bubbles with words inside them, and they are linked together with lines or arrows to show their relationship.
. . . Dr. [Kripa] Sundar can’t say enough about how great concept maps are for learning. “It’s such a packed strategy,” she says. In an article for AFT, she points out that multiple meta-analyses support the effectiveness of concept maps, many of them suggesting that they have a bigger impact on learning than lectures, discussions, or text summaries.
