On making sense of ideas, or Teaching for Understanding

Caroline Walker-GleavesSchool of Education and Lifelong LearningUniversity of Sunderland

This session concerns teachers who ask of themselves the following questions: "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?" "Am I really reaching all my students?" "How can I make my class mean more to students than just

a matter of passing?" "How can I help students see that their grades are

meaningful?" "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?"

What is Understanding?

Put simply, understanding is being able to carry out a variety of actions or "performances" that show one's grasp of a topic and at the same time advance it. It is being able to take knowledge and use it in new ways.

But what does this really mean? Knowledge, skill, and understanding are the

currency of education and training in every possible context. Most teachers show a vigorous commitment to all three. Everyone wants students to emerge from their learning experiences with a good repertoire of knowledge, well-developed skills, and an understanding of the meaning, significance, and use of what they have studied. So it's really important to ask what conception of knowledge, skill, and understanding lays beneath what happens in classrooms among teachers and students to foster these attainments.

Well, let’s begin with asking what are knowledge and skill? For knowledge and skill, an approximate answer

is quite straightforward. Knowledge is information ready to use. We feel assured a student has knowledge when the student can reproduce it when asked. The student can tell us things. This type of knowledge is often called declarative. And likewise therefore, if knowledge is information on tap, skills are routine performances on tap. We find out whether the skills are present by turning the tap. To know whether a student writes well, we would look at their writing. To check if the student is a good practitioner, we would watch them at work.

So what’s understanding? Well, understanding proves more elusive.

Certainly it does not reduce to knowledge. Understanding the first law of thermodynamics is more that reproducing the law. Understanding also is more than a routine and well-honed skill. The student who efficiently solves complex problems or writes elegant prose may not understand the content of their work at all. While knowledge and skill can be translated as visible information and viewable performance, understanding is more subtle altogether.

So is it possible to understand understanding? Yes! In a phrase, understanding is the

ability to think and act flexibly with what one knows. Or, an understanding of a topic is a "flexible performance capability" with emphasis on the flexible. In keeping with this, learning for understanding is like learning a flexible performance – a constant improvisation, where although learning facts is often an important base for understanding, learning facts is not the same as learning for understanding.  

Let’s try an experiment to see how you conceive of learning for understanding

This exercise explores understanding from an interactive perspective-one that asks you to reflect on, and share your own personal experiences. This is a set of questions about understanding that I have already tried out with other teachers and educators. As you read through them, make sure you answer the questions for yourself carefully before comparing what you came up with to what other people have given. The first few questions you should do on your own, then when the slide tells you, you should work in a group of about 3 or 4 people.

Also!! This is an excellent way to unearth resources in a

community!

What do you understand really well? Think for a moment about something that you

understand very well. It might be something that you do in your house, or in your work, or in your play. But it should be something that, intuitively, you think or feel you understand.

Write it here:

Now compare and revise Here are some of the answers other people have given.

Look them over after and, if you feel it's necessary, revise your own answer:

driving cooking decorating/home design cricket playing the trombone dancing to Cuban music the blues scale garden weeding databases karate

Do you want to revise your answer here?………………………………….

How did you get or develop that understanding? Now, write some thoughts about

how you got the understanding you identified. What did you do to develop it?

Compare and revise Again, here is a list of some of the things others have said asked this question.

Read through the list and compare them with your experiences:

doing something observing not giving up having a coach/teacher practicing getting help breaking a task into parts talking aloud feeling success trial and error asking questions having passion persevering observing and evaluating talking to experts reading failing comparing schema or general cases using intuition thinking about something Your reflections?…………..

How do you know you understand?

Now, a third question. How do you know that you understand what you think you understand? What is it that convinces you that you do, or how well you do?

Write your answer here:

Compare and revise Once again, here is a selection of what others have said and

revise your thoughts if you want:• being able to do something • teaching someone else • solving a related problem • asking productive questions • assessing others' performances • predicting and avoiding problems • performing in lots of different situations • saying how you came to understand • using an error to your advantage • being able to say why a performance is good • recognizing less than exemplary performances• Revision:……………………

Delving deeper – a question of generalisation Now onto another set of questions I will pose after brainstorming about

the three questions you just answered. This time, I’d like you to work in groups to generalise: What do you notice about each of these lists? Do you see any commonalities? Anything surprising? If you had to choose one answer from each, which would it be? Why?

Answer: List 1 List 2 List 3

A hypothesis……… For the first question, people allude to such things as

complexity, engagement, and personal importance. That's really about topics, and it possibly suggests criteria by which to choose such topics well-suited for developing understanding.

What do you think about that?

Another hypothesis…….. For the question, "How did you get that understanding?"

people seem to choose something about doing-trial and error, practicing, trying-and often add "reflecting" and "again and again" or "back and forth" to that. This almost certainly has implications for the ways one might go about helping students to develop understanding.

What do you think about that?

And a further hypothesis! For "How do you know you understand?" people once

again generally cite something about doing-feeling satisfaction when doing it, teaching it, predicting and solving problems-they know they understand because they can use the knowledge. Again, that has implications for how to assess students' understanding.

What do you think about that?

Did you find something you

understand? Did you find that what you understand is described by a

performance? That's what the performance view of understanding is all about. It says that understanding is doing something useful with knowledge. But it's something of a curiosity how dissimilar these lists are to what students are often asked to do to learn or show what they know in classrooms. They "cover" a new topic in each subject or class. They are asked to listen for an hour or so. The chance to show what they know is often only through written forms. The critical question is, if "understanding" generally means the kinds of things listed above, can that actually be acquired in a classroom? I and others think it’s certainly possible. It should be the aim of every teacher for their learners to own knowledge and contextualize it for themselves so that they can use it when they need it. This is Teaching for Understanding and teachers can learn how to help students to acquire that depth of understanding.

How therefore can we teach for understanding? We have already established that what is understanding?" is a

difficult question. But in practical terms people are not so bewildered. We all know it when we see it. Teachers and indeed most of us seem to share a good intuition about how to gauge understanding. We ask learners not just to know, but to think with what they know. We often use words like explain, describe, be insightful, when we want to assess understanding.

But two key ideas follow from these every-day observations. First of all, to gauge a person's understanding-so-far, ask 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 almost certainly advances it. By working through their understanding in response to a particular challenge, they come to understand better. In fact, we move learners on from declarative, through discursive, to deliberative processes, and when students deliberate, they are forced to think and re-think and understand better.

The impact of understanding on assessment is profound….. The notion that people recognise understanding through

performance not only makes common sense after we think of our own experiences, but appears to be a central thread throughout a range of research in human cognition, from Piaget through to Knowles, from Perkins through to Gardner. Depending on the subject context, it can often translate as assessing a knowledge base in its own language, to something else, such as a quantitative problem explained qualitatively; a text explained through diagrams, and so on. With familiar ‘grammar’ removed, students' answers and explanations reveal whether they understand actual principles involved.

So, to make a generalise, we recognise understanding through a flexible performance criterion. Understanding is exposed when people can think and act flexibly with what they know. In contrast, when a learner cannot go beyond rote and routine thought and action, this signals a lack of understanding.

The teaching for understanding framework This is a very well researched and powerful framework for Teaching for

Understanding framework, evolving through a research project - Project Zero – at Harvard culminating in a model developed in 1996, and links what David Perkins has called "four cornerstones of pedagogy" with four elements of planning and teaching and learning:

 Four Central Questions About Teaching

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?

TfU Element Addressing each Question

Generative Topics

Understanding Goals

Understanding Performances

Ongoing Assessment

Guidelines and conceptual categories The TfU framework is not a recipe, but rather a set of

general guidelines. To quote David Perkins, it provides "optimal ambiguity"— that is, both enough structure and enough flexibility to serve teachers' needs and allow room for personal expression.

So the framework under discussion uses 5 conceptual categories to form these actual guidelines:

Throughlines Generative Topics Understanding Goals Performances of Understanding Ongoing Assessment

Throughlines Overarching goals, or throughlines,

describe the most important understandings that students should develop during an entire course. The understanding goals for particular units should be closely related to one or more of the overarching understanding goals of the course.

Generative Topics Determining what materials to teach in a course can

be one of the most challenging tasks a teacher faces. Students have a great deal to learn - and so little

class time in which to begin to learn it. How do we make decisions about what to include in a course? What material is going to be the most fruitful? In teaching for understanding, the answer is "generative topics".

Generative topics are issues, themes, concepts, and ideas that provide enough depth, significance, connections, and variety of perspectives to support students' development of powerful understandings.

Understanding Goals Few of us would set off on a trip without first having a sense of where we want to

go. The idea of wandering aimlessly might sound exciting, but in actual fact, syllabuses and assessment regimes curtail our time and resources. So we think carefully about where we'd like to go, and we have that destination in mind when we set out. Knowing where we want to end up helps us gauge our progress as we travel. It helps us decide when to stop to rest, when to go, and when to modify our itinerary.

Similarly, at the start of each unit we set off with our students on an intellectual journey, to explore the "territory" of a generative topic. Given that there are often lots of interesting points to explore, we might simply let our students follow their interests and wander. But our time is very limited. We want to give our students time to explore what intrigues them, and we want to make sure they visit the important sites they might miss without guidance. Fortunately these territories are not wholly uncharted:education research shows us that our personal experiences, and our work with previous classes can help us to map out the landscape and pinpoint some of the most interesting and fruitful places to stop. So some parts of the journey we can leave to independent exploration, but in other parts we guide students to a few destinations that we want to make sure they reach. These destinations are known as understanding goals. They are the concepts, processes, and skills we most want our students to understand. They help to create focus by stating where students are going.

Performances of Understanding Imagine trying to learn how to play the cello from a book or from lectures given by expert cellists.

You study diagrams showing the position of the bow, instrument, and finger positions. You read about the process of . You memorize the appropriate braking distances. Putting your fingers in the 3rd position and of mastering vibrato.An experienced cellist explains how to orient the bow to play harmonics. You also hear lectures on how to do pizzicato. When you have read or heard about all of the various skills and techniques used in cello playing, you sit down with a cello and attempt to take the Grade 8 Practical exam.

Very few (if any!) of us would pass the exam under such circumstances. Certainly the books and lectures would have given us some information essential to playing, such as it is necessary to tighten the bow before playing or use resin on the bow. We might have memorized a great deal about the placement of the fingers and the posture and movement of the elbow and wrist. But we would not know how to use that knowledge judiciously in the infinite variety of circumstances which present themselves during a recital at any given time. Without actual practice playing the cello under a variety of conditions with ongoing coaching and feedback from a cello teacher, we cannot learn to play with precision and grace.

Students learning in institutional settings need the same kinds of experiences. They might acquire pieces of knowledge from books and lectures, but without the opportunity to apply that knowledge constantly in a variety of situations with guidance from a knowledgeable coach, they are not likely to develop understanding. Performances of understanding, or understanding performances, are the activities that give students those opportunities. Performances of understanding 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. The best performances of understanding help students both develop, demonstrate and advance their understanding.

Ongoing Assessment How can we assess accurately and fairly what students have learned? This is a

question every teacher wrestles with. But 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.

This kind of assessment occurs frequently in many situations outside ‘learning institutions’, such as in games, informal learning contexts, the workplace, through play and so on.

Or think of a director's work as she rehearses a troupe of actors for a stage production. Each rehearsal is a continuous cycle of performance and feedback as the actors work through their scenes. The director gives initial instructions, offers advice and further direction while the scene is in progress, and convenes more formal feedback sessions at various points during the rehearsal.

This integration of performance and feedback is exactly what students need as they work to develop their understanding of a particular topic or concept. In the teaching for understanding framework, it is called "ongoing assessment." 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.