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Teaching for Understanding
Consider the difference between these two questions:
What is the answer to this math problem?
Why is this the answer?
The answers to the questions reflect the difference between mastery of a skill and understanding a concept.
What does it mean to understand?
While the educational pendulum has swung toward standards-driven curricula and outcome-based education, at the heart of authentic learning is understanding the big, content-related picture. What does it mean to understand and how is understanding different from developing a skill base?
Consider that often when information is shared with a group of students, several may do well on the assessment, but when asked to apply the knowledge in a different situation, only some students will be able to perform. Why? Such students can demonstrate their knowledge of facts and skills-their tacit understanding of a concept; why can't these same students demonstrate implicit knowledge?
Are standards enough?
Is teaching to the standards enough, when standards are one-dimensional and skill based? Or, as authors Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe suggest in Understanding By Design, should educators go beyond teaching "discrete facts or skills to focus on larger concepts, principles, or processes" (1) as applicable in new situations and beyond the subject matter?
Students who gain understandings of subject matter apply such understandings in flexible, sophisticated ways.
For example, a student who understands the concept of chronological organization will apply it consistently in history when creating a time line, in science or math when explaining a lab or formula, or in English when writing a process paper. Real knowledge, or understanding,
- involves transfer, or using information in new ways
- occurs in degrees as indicated in Bloom's Taxonomy
- is furthered through application and inquiry.
For students to acquire a basic skill set in any given subject is generally a straightforward task: learning goals are easily identified and easily measured.
How important is instructional design?
Understanding, however, means that students understand the skill in its broadest sense. Instructional design, even in a standards driven environment, can promote understanding while simultaneously preparing students to perform on the high-stakes tests required for promotion or graduation in many states.
Such instructional design requires teachers to be clear as to:
- the content students should merely encounter
- essential content they should master
- the overriding content ideas that students should fully "understand."
Wiggins and McTighe offer the following criteria to aid teachers in determining the validity of teaching a concept for understanding:
- Does the concept have enduring value?
- Does the concept reside at the heart of the subject?
- Does the concept lend itself to inquiry?
- Does the concept have the potential to engage learners?
How can I teach for understanding?
Understanding becomes difficult when students are offered the wrong ideas to understand. Teachers should envision a student at the far end of a course and determine not only the skills the student should have, but also the subject matter concepts the student should understand. They should then determine the questions to ask and the application to require in order to promote understanding.
McTighe and Wiggins offer six facets of understanding, and suggest essential questions that drive understanding at each facet. Courses, units, and lessons that incorporate core essential questions are more likely to foster understanding in students.
The table below identifies the six strategies offered by McTighe and Wiggins as essential to student understanding, along with questions that, when included in instruction, lead students to understanding.
| Facets of Understanding |
Key Questions |
Facet 1: Explanation
Students can provide sophisticated and apt explanations and theories, which provide knowledgeable and justified accounts of events, actions, and ideas.
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- Why is that so?
- How can that be explained?
- How can that be proven?
- To what is this connected?
- How does it work?
- What is implied?
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Facet 2: Interpretation
Students create meaning in what they learn.
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- What does it mean?
- Why does it matter?
- What of it?
- What does it illustrate or illuminate in human experience?
- How does it relate to me?
- What makes sense?
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Facet 3: Application
Students gain the ability to use knowledge effectively in new situations and diverse contexts.
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- How and where can we use this knowledge, skill, or process?
- How should my thinking and action be modified to meet the demands of this particular situation?
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Facet 4: Perspective
Students can see critical and insightful points of view.
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- From whose point of view?
- From which vantage point?
- What is assumed or tacit that needs to be made explicit and considered?
- What is justified or warranted?
- Is there adequate evidence?
- Is it reasonable?
- What are the strengths or weaknesses of the idea?
- Is it plausible?
- What are its limits? So what?
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Facet 5: Empathy
Students have the ability to get inside another person's feelings and worldview.
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- How does it seem to you?
- What do they see that I don't?
- What do I need to experience if I am to understand?
- What was the artist or performer feeling, seeing, and trying to make me feel and see?
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Facet 6: Self-Knowledge
Self-knowledge includes the wisdom to know one's ignorance and how one's patterns of thought and action inform as well as prejudice understanding.
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- How does who I am shape my views?
- What are the limits of my understanding?
- What are my blind spots?
- What am I prone to misunderstand because of prejudice, habit, or style?
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What is the answer?
Coupling inquiry of the big picture with performance-based standards creates a framework for instructional design that satisfies learning on a multitude of levels, and equips students to answer correctly both questions:
What is the answer to this math problem?
Why is this the answer?
Teachers who carefully identify the concepts worthy of understanding and design curriculum around these concepts are increasing the likelihood that students will understand; that they will acquire knowledge that can be applied in "flexible, sophisticated ways."
Source:
1. Wiggins, G. and McTighe, J. (1998). Understanding By Design.
Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.
Alexandria, Virginia.
This article was contributed by Janice Christy, M.Ed., English Department Chair, Louisa County High School, Louisa, Virginia.
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