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Teaching for Understanding
Helping students acquire lasting knowledge and skills is the primary goal of teachers. Learn more about integrating a more effective approach to the curriculum.
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. Authors Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe suggest in Understanding By Design that too many students simply learn discrete facts or skills. To achieve deeper and more lasting understandings, teachers should “focus on larger concepts, principles, or processes" as they apply to new situations and beyond the subject matter.
Role of Instructional Design
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 about
Such instructional design requires teachers to be clear about
· the content students should merely encounter
· essential content they should master
· the overriding content ideas that students should fully "understand"
Considerations for Teaching
Understanding becomes difficult when students are offered incomplete ideas. 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.
Understanding becomes difficult when students are offered incomplete ideas. 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.
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Facets of Understanding
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Key Questions
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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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Facet 2: Interpretation
Students create meaning in what they learn. |
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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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Facet 4: Perspective
Students can see critical and insightful points of view. |
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Facet 5: Empathy
Students have the ability to get inside another person's feelings and worldview. |
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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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Flexible and Sophisticated Results
Coupling inquiry of the big picture with performance-based standards creates a framework for instructional design that satisfies learning on a multitude of levels.
Teachers who carefully identify the concepts worthy of understanding and design curriculum around these concepts increase the likelihood that students will understand and 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.
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