Developing Wisdom Using Understanding by Design and Critical Thinking

1. Developing Wisdom Using Understanding by Design and Critical Thinking Dr. David Williams Indiana Academy for Science, Mathematics, and Humanities Ms. Margot Williams Ball State University National Association for Gifted Children November 13, 2010

2. Understanding Students can learn wisdom through reflective responses to essential questions that focus on making a connection between the content, understanding, and wisdom Essential Questions Why is developing wisdom important for students? Why is developing understanding important for acquiring wisdom? How do you design an engaging instructional unit that develops understanding and teaches wisdom? How to you use subject matter content that to develop wisdom?

3. Why is developing wisdom important for students? Why is developing understanding important for developing wisdom? Students can learn wisdom through reflective responses to essential questions that focus on making a connection between the content, understanding, and wisdom Essential questions help the student uncover the enduring understandings How do you design an engaging instructional unit that develops understanding and teaches wisdom? How do you use subject matter content to teach wisdom?

4. Why is developing wisdom important for students?

5. Why is developing wisdom important for students? Why can smart people be so stupid? IntelligentWise Ken Lay X Neville Chamberlain X Adolf Hitler X Josef Stalin X Martin Luther King X X Nelson Mandela X X Mahatma Ghandi X X Mother Teresa X X

6. Why is developing understanding important for acquiring wisdom? Wisdom: Use of intelligence to seek the common good Understanding: the big ideas of a discipline that can be transferred to different contexts

7. How do you design engaging instructional units that develop understanding and teach wisdom? • Understanding by Design (UbD) • Framework for purposeful and intentional • thinking and instructional planning where understanding is the primary goal • Focuses the thinking and planning of student • learning around ideas that enables the • transfer of knowledge into understanding

8. Understanding by Design Backwards Planning Begins at the End: Identifying what you want students to know, understand, and be able to do upon completion of the learning experience

9. Understanding by Design (UbD) • An instructional planning process in occurs in three stages: • (1) identifying desired results, • (2) determining acceptable evidence, and • planning learning experiences and • instruction.

10. Understanding by Design Stage 1 Identify the desired results of the unit in terms of enduring understandings and essential questions that help uncover the enduring understandings. (Assessments are formed from evidence of student understanding based on responses to the essential questions.)

11. Enduring Understandings Embody the big ideas that “reside at the heart of a discipline.” Laws are essential to maintaining freedom because they specify the limits of a government’s power and the rights of individuals. Form the parameters for specifying the important knowledge and skills to be learned. A balance must exist in the environment that should allow for clean air, fresh water, and soil capable of producing food.

12. Enduring Understandings Encompass the larger concepts, principles, and processes of a discipline, not discrete facts or skills. Rules establish order in a family What “we want students to get inside of and retain after they have forgotten many of the details.” Life cycles ensure the continuation of a species.

13. Essential Questions • Overarching and topical questions with no obvious right answer that go to the “heart of the discipline.” • Help the students uncover the enduring understandings • A balance must exist in the environment that should allow for clean air, fresh water, and soil capable of producing food. • Why is an environmental balance necessary to continue and • sustain life? • How much clean air is enough? • How can be balance economic progress and protection of our environment?

14. Essential questions should: • be engaging and provocative • engage and focus inquiry • call for students to make meaning • provide for “deliberate interrogation of the content.” Enduring Understanding

15. Using Enduring Understandings and Essential Questions to Engender Wisdom

16. WISDOM The application of successful intelligence as mediated by values toward the achievement of a common good…..

17. WISDOM Achievement of the Common Good ? Values Values Successful Intelligence

18. Building Successful Intelligence The ability to achieve success in life, given one’s personal standards, within one’s sociocultural context in order to adapt to, shape, and select environments via recognition of and capitalization on strengths and remediation of or compensation for weaknesses through a balance of analytical, creative, and practical abilities.

19. TRIARCHIC THEORY OF INTELLIGENCE Analytic Intelligence Mental steps or components used to solve problems Analyze, Compare and Contrast, evaluate, explain, judge, critique Practical Intelligence Ability to read and adapt to the contexts of everyday life Use, Apply, Implement, Employ, Contextualize Creative IntelligenceUse of experience in ways that foster insight Create, Design, Invent, Imagine, Suppose

20. Successful Intelligence? Jake Sully

21. Wisdom The application of successful intelligence as mediated by values toward the achievement of a common good through a balance among intrapersonal, (b) interpersonal, and (c) extrapersonal interests over short and long terms, in order to achieve balance among (a) adaptation to existing environments, (b) shaping of existing environments, and (c) selection of new environments.

22. WISDOM Achievement of the Common Good Selection Balance within Environmental Context Shaping Adaptation Values Values Extrapersonal Balance of Interests: Short Term/Long Term Interpersonal Intrapersonal Successful Intelligence

23. Intrapersonal Interpersonal Extrapersonal

24. How to you use subject matter content to develop wisdom?

25. Develop enduring understanding(s) for the unit Wisdom, Abraham Lincoln, and the Emancipation Proclamation Enduring Understanding The Emancipation Proclamation was a product of its social, political, and military context.

26. Develop overarching essential question(s) to help student uncover the enduring understanding(s) and explore wisdom Enduring Understanding The Emancipation Proclamation was a product of its social, political, and military context. Overarching Essential Question to Explore Wisdom To what extent was Lincoln’s decision in the timing and the scope of the Emancipation Proclamation a wise one?

27. Develop supporting essential question(s) to assist students in answering the overarching essential question(s) Balance of Interests: 1. Analytical Intelligence 2. Creative Intelligence 3. Practical Intelligence Intrapersonal Interpersonal Extrapersonal Balance of Responses to Environmental Context: 1. Analytical Intelligence 2. Creative Intelligence 3. Practical Intelligence Adaptation Selecting Shaping

28. Balance of Interests: Short/Long Term

29. Analytic Intelligence: How did Lincoln balance his own views of slavery (intrapersonal) with those of his advisors and political party (interpersonal) and the welfare of the United States (extrapersonal)?[Analyze and Explain] How would the views of the radical Republicans regarding the freeing of the slaves been received in the short term? the long term? [Judge] Balance of Interests: Short/Long Term

30. Balance of Interests: Short/Long Term Creative Intelligence: 1. What might have happened that could cause Lincoln to change his mind (intrapersonal) and follow the views of the abolitionists? 2. What might have happened within the Republican party (interpersonal) if Lincoln had followed the views of the abolitionists in both the short and long term? 3. What might have happened in both the Union and Confederacy (extrapersonal) in the short and long term if Lincoln had followed the views of the abolitionists?

31. Balance of Interests: Short/Long Term Practical Intelligence: 1. How did learning about Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation change the way you might think (intrapersonal) about dealing with situations in your own life? How would you apply Lincoln’s actions regarding the Emancipation Proclamation in dealing with people in your own life (interpersonal)? How might the country be better or worse if all leaders acted as Lincoln (extrapersonal)?

32. Balance within the Environmental Context

33. Balance within the Environmental Context Analytic Intelligence How did the political and military environment affect the Emancipation Proclamation (adapt)? 2. How did the issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation change the Union’s military and political strategy (shape)? 3. Why or why not might it have been better to wait to later in the Civil War and issue a proclamation more in concert with the views of the abolitionists (select)?

34. Balance within the Environmental Context Creative Intelligence 1. Given the political and military environment, what might Lincoln have done to improve the Emancipation Proclamation (adapt)? What might the Confederacy have done to counter the political and military effects of the Emancipation Proclamation (shape)? 3. How might the Emancipation Proclamation been different if Lincoln had waited until later in the Civil War when a Union victory was inevitable (select)?

35. Balance within the Environmental Context Practical Intelligence 1. How did learning about Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation change the way you might think about dealing with situations in your own life (adapt)? How would you apply Lincoln’s actions regarding the Emancipation Proclamation in dealing with people in your own life (shaping)? How might you apply Lincoln’s sense of timing to your own life (selection)?

36. Sixteen Principles for Teaching Wisdom* • Explore with students the notion that conventional abilities and achievements are not enough for a satisfying life. Many people be­come trapped in their lives and, despite feeling conventionally suc­cessful, feel that their lives lack fulfillment Fulfillment is not an alternative to success, but is an aspect of it that, for most people, goes beyond money, promotions, large houses, and so forth. • Demonstrate how wisdom is critical for a satisfying life. In the long run, wise decisions benefit people in ways that foolish decisions never do. • Teach students the usefulness of interdependence — a rising tide raises all ships; a falling tide can sink them. • Teach role-model wisdom because what you do is more important than what you say. Wisdom is action-dependent and wise actions need to be demonstrated. • Have students read about wise judgments and decision making so they understand that there are such means of judging and decision making. Help students to recognize their own interests, those of other people, and those of institutions. • Help students to recognize their own interests, those of other people, and those of institutions.

37. Help students to balance their own interests, those of other people, and those of institutions. • 8. Teach students that the "means" by which the end is obtained matters, not just the end. • 9. Help students learn the roles of adaptation, shaping, and selection, and how to balance them. Wise judgments are dependent in part on selecting among these environmental responses. • 10. Encourage students to form, critique, and integrate their own values in their thinking.  • 11. Encourage students to think dialectically, realizing that both ques­tions and their answers evolve over time, and that the answer to an important life question can differ at different times in one's life (such as whether to go to college). • 12. Show students the importance of dialogical thinking, whereby they understand interests and ideas from multiple points of view. • 13. Teach students to search for and then try to reach the common good — a good where everyone wins, not only those with whom one identifies.

38. 14. Encourage and reward wisdom. • 15. Teach students to monitor events in their lives and their own thought processes about these events. One way to recognize others' interests is to begin to identify one's own. • 16. Help students understand the importance of inoculating oneself against the pressures of unbalanced self-interest and small-group interest. • *Sternberg, Robert J., Wisdom, Intelligence, and Creativity Synthesized, Cambridge University Press: New York, 2003, pp. 164-65.