Teaching for Understanding Rethinking Classroom Practice

1. Teaching for UnderstandingRethinking Classroom Practice Presented by: PJ Fenstermacher

2. Mind by Richard Wilbur Mind in its purest play is like some bat That beats about in caverns all alone, Contriving by a kind of senseless wit Not to conclude against a wall of stone. It has no need to falter or explore; Darkly it knows what obstacles are there, And so may weave and flitter, dip and soar In perfect courses through the blackest air. And has this simile a like perfection? The mind is like a bat. Precisely. Save That in the very happiest intellection A graceful error may correct the cave.

3. Rethinking Your Classroom • "How do I decide what is important for my students to learn?" • "Can I convince others - and my own students - that what we are studying is important?" • "What are my students really getting out of this class?" • "Why can't my students seem to remember anything from the previous unit once we move on to the next one?" • "Am I really reaching all my students?" • "How can I make my class mean more to students than just another grade on their report card?" • "How can I help students see that their grades aren't arbitrary?" • "Will my students be able to use anything they learn in this class in the future? How will I know?" • "How can I have a conversation with my colleagues about what we're teaching and what our students are learning?"

4. So,what isUnderstanding?

5. Understanding is . . . The ability to think and act flexibly with what one knows. In contrast, when a learner cannot go beyond rote and routine thought and action, this signals lack of understanding.

6. Four Dimensions of Understanding • Content – What do you understand? • Methods – How do you know you understand? • Purposes – What is the point of understanding? • Form – How do others know you understand?

7. HOW CAN WE TEACH FOR UNDERSTANDING? 1. Make learning a long-term, thinking-centered process. 2. Provide for rich ongoing assessment. 3. Support learning with powerful representations. 4. Pay heed to developmental factors. 5. Induct students into the discipline. 6. Teach for transfer.

8. Make learning a long-term, thinking-centered process. • Arrange for the students to think with and about the ideas they are learning for an extended period of time, so that they learn their way around a topic. • Culminate with understanding performances such as an essay or an exhibition.

9. Provide for rich ongoing assessment. • To learn effectively, students need criteria, feedback, and opportunities for reflection from the beginning of any sequence of instruction. • Assessment should occur throughout the learning process from beginning to end.

10. Assessing for Learning • Learning Portfolios • artifacts with student reflections • Throughlines • Inquiry to guide instruction based on continual reflection and ongoing assessment • Rubrics • Constructive guides for self-evaluation • Rubric Creator

11. Support learning with powerful representations. • Conceptual models • usually in the form of diagrams with accompanying story lines carefully crafted according to several principles. • Computer environments • Virtual Experiences • Well-chosen analogies often serve to illuminate concepts.

12. Pay heed to developmental factors. • Children can understand much more than was thought much earlier than was thought. • Complexity is a critical variable in developing a central conceptual structure. • Bear in mind factors like complexity, but without rigid conceptions of what students can and cannot learn at certain ages.

13. Induct students into the discipline. • Concepts and principles in a discipline are not understood in isolation. • Experience how the discipline works -- how one justifies, explains, solves problems, and manages inquiry within the discipline.

14. Teach for transfer. • Teach explicitly for transfer, helping students to make the connections they otherwise might not make, and helping them to cultivate mental habits of connection-making • Ask the learner to go beyond the information given, tackling some task of justification, explanation, example-finding.

15. Getting Started

16. What is teaching for understanding?“The Cornerstone of Pedagogy” • What shall we teach? • What is worth understanding? • How shall we teach for understanding? • How can students and teacher know what students understand and how students can develop deeper understanding?

17. WHAT SHOULD WE TEACH FOR UNDERSTANDING? • What's most worth students' efforts to understand? • Emphasize knowledge with rich ramifications in the lives of learners. • Knowledge worth understanding. • Connected curriculum

18. Two Key Ideas • Gauge a person's understanding-so-far by asking the person to do something that puts the understanding to work - explaining, solving a problem, building an argument, constructing a product. • Second, what learners do in response not only shows their understanding-so-far but very likely advances it. By working through their understanding in response to a particular challenge, they come to understand better.

19. Framework of Essential Ideas • Generative Topics • Understanding Goals (Throughlines) • Performances of Understanding • Ongoing Assessment

20. WHAT IS GENERATIVE KNOWLEDGE? • What is a living thing? Most of the universe is dead matter, with a few precious enclaves of life. But what is life in its essence? Are viruses alive? What about computer viruses (some argue that they are)? What about crystals? If they are not, why not? • Civil disobedience. This theme connects to adolescents' concerns with rules and justice, to episodes of civil disobedience in history and literature, and to one's role as a responsible citizen in a nation, community, or, for that matter, a school. • RAP: ratio and proportion. Research shows that many students have a poor grasp of this very central concept, a concept that, like statistics and probability, comes up all the time. Dull? Not necessarily. The teachers who suggested this pointed out many surprising situations where ratio and proportion enter--in poetry, music and musical notation, diet, sports statistics, and so on. • Whose history? It's been said that history gets written by the victors. This theme addresses point blank how accounts of history get shaped by those who write it -- the victors, sometimes the dissidents, and those with other special interests.

21. Key Features of Generative Topics • Central to one or more domains or disciplines • Interesting to students • Interesting to the teacher • Accessible • Offer opportunities for multiple connections

22. Developing a Generative Topic • If you can identify the four to eight central questions that you feel would ultimately benefit your students in their learning -- engaging them, engaging you, and proving immensely generative in their presence - then you can use those central questions to guide or map the journey of your teaching and their learning throughout the year. • The point is not to arrive quickly at one, single answer, but to develop richer and more sophisticated answers over time through several experiences of learning and reflection. • The Generative topic leads to throughlines - the theme that is essential for generating understanding.

23. Generative Topics • In biology: the definition of life, rain forests, dinosaurs, endangered species, global warming. • In mathematics: the concept of zero, patterns, equality, representations in signs and symbols, size and scale. • In history: maritime disasters, survival, revolution, conflict, power. • In literature: interpreting texts, folktales, humor, multiple perspectives.

24. ThroughlinesCentral Questions of Inquiry." • Develop and post questions (Throughlines) that make clear to students what they are learning and why. • Throughlines tend to be great questions that often are at the heart of disciplinary inquiry and lead to ever more articulate and deep response.

25. Throughlines Capturing the essence of a whole course • For an American history course: "How does our historical past make us who we are today?" • For a general science course: "Students will understand that 'doing science' is not the process of finding facts but of constructing and testing theories." • For an algebra course: "How can we use what we know to figure out what we don't know?" • For a literature course: "Students will understand how metaphors shape the way we experience the world."

26. Understanding Goals • Understanding goals identify the concepts, processes, and skills that we most want our students to understand. They are worded in two ways: as statements (in forms such as, "Students will understand ..." or "Students will appreciate ...") and as open-ended questions ("What are the important similarities and differences among different genres of literature?"). • Unit-long understanding goals focus on the central aspects of a generative topic.

27. Example Understanding Goals For a history unit with generative topic "Freedom at a Cost: Understanding the Bill of Rights": "Students will understand the relationship between rights and responsibilities in a democratic society." For a geometry unit with the generative topic "Finding Out What's True: Proofs in Mathematics": "Students will develop their understanding of both inductive and deductive approaches to proving various statements (for examples, that two triangles are congruent, that two lines are parallel, and so on)." For a literature unit with the generative topic "Whodunits and How They're Done": "Students will understand how authors create, develop, and sustain suspense in a plot." For a biology unit with the generative topic "The Meaning of 'Life'": "Students will understand how a biologist distinguishes between living and nonliving things."

28. Unit-long understanding goals should relate to: • Your overarching goals:Ask yourself, "What do I want my students to get out of their year's worth of work with me?” • The generative topic:Ask yourself, "What is most important for my students to understand about this topic?” • The performances of understanding:Ask yourself, "What do I want students to understand about this topic?” • Your ongoing assessments:Ask yourself, "What criteria will help me and my students figure out what they understand?"

29. Performances of Understanding • Are the activities that give students those opportunities. • Require students to go beyond the information given to create something new by reshaping, expanding, extrapolating from, applying, and building on what they already know. • Help students both develop and demonstrate their understanding.

30. Ongoing Assessment • When understanding is the purpose of instruction, the process of assessment is more than just evaluation: it is a substantive contribution to learning. • Assessment that fosters understanding (rather than simply evaluating it) has to be more than an end-of-the-unit test. • It needs to inform students and teachers about both what students currently understand and how to proceed with subsequent teaching and learning. • Ongoing assessment is the process of providing students with clear responses to their performances of understanding in a way that will help to improve next performances.

31. Established Criteria for each performance of understanding need to be: • Clear (articulated explicitly at the beginning of each performance of understanding--though they may well evolve over the course of the performance, especially if it is new to the teacher as well as the students). • Relevant (closely related to the understanding goals for the unit). • Public (everyone in the classroom knows and understands them).

32. Feedback needs to: • Occur frequently, from the beginning of the unit to its conclusion, in conjunction with performances of understanding. Some occasions for feedback may be formal and planned (such as those related to presentations); some may be more casual and informal (such as responding to a student's comment in a class discussion). • Come from a variety of perspectives: from students' reflection on their own work, from classmates reflecting on one another's work, and from the teacher. • Inform your planning of subsequent classes and activities. • Provide students with information not only about how well they have carried out performances but also how they might improve them.

33. Rethinking classroom practice begins with reflection on the question:

34. Is my curriculum, instruction, and assessment designed and practiced in a way that truly results in student understanding? • Am I engaging my students in performances that help them to truly build their own understanding? • Am I sure about the few things I really want my students to understand? • Have I clearly shared those goals with my students, so that they can actively participate in achieving them? • Am I engaging them in inquiry about a topic that they truly care about, that I care about, and that ultimately is at the heart of the discipline I teach? • Am I practicing learning-centered assessment, involving my students in their own assessments based on criteria that are clearly articulated?

35. Summary • Design your curriculum around generative topics, topics that have great connections to students' interests and experience, and that are central to the discipline. • Clearly articulate and share with your students your goals of understanding, what you most want your students to understand from their experience with you. • Engage your students in performances of understanding, performances that cause students to do a great deal of thinking when using, applying, and enriching what they know in challenging, disciplinary work. • Practice ongoing assessment, learning-centered assessment throughout instruction that actively involves you and your students in constant reflection about what is being learned, how it is being learned, and why it is being learned.

36. Bibliography Blythe, Tina & Associates (1998). The Teaching for Understanding Guide. San Francisco:Jossey-Bass. Stone-Wiske, Martha (1998). Teaching for Understanding. San Francisco:Jossey-Bass.