TY - JOUR AU - Atkins, Celeste PY - 2019/09/27 Y2 - 2024/03/28 TI - 20 Concepts: A new way to teach an Introductory Course JF - TRAILS: Teaching Resources and Innovations Library for Sociology JA - TRAILS VL - IS - SE - DO - UR - https://trails.asanet.org/article/view/20-concepts-a-new-way-to-teach-an-introductory SP - AB - Teaching an Introduction to Sociology course is a challenging proposal. One must shallowly cover a vast amount of information in what is never enough time. At the community college level this is often exacerbated by the level of college-preparedness, study skills, and reading skills of the students. After making the common new instructor mistake of trying to cover fully everything in the textbook each semester, I have through years of iterations created and refined an approach I refer to as the 20 Concepts Approach. In this approach, I identify the 20 most important concepts that I want students to learn from each chapter/module. These concepts may repeat (for example theories such as the social construction of reality) and we discuss much more than these concepts in our classes, however, instead of providing study guides, I provide students with the 20 concepts and find ways to reiterate and focus on these concepts multiple times within the chapter/module. This approach not only makes studying more manageable for students, it also forces them to practice not only pulling out the pertinent information from the chapter, but also providing their own definitions of concepts and how they appear in our social world. ER -