Transcript On making sense of ideas - gp

On making sense of ideas, or
Teaching for Understanding
Caroline Walker-Gleaves
School of Education and Lifelong Learning
University of Sunderland
This session concerns teachers who ask of
themselves the following questions:
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"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?
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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?
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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?
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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?
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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
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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?
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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
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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:
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driving
cooking
decorating/home design
cricket
playing the trombone
dancing to Cuban music
the blues scale
garden weeding
databases
karate
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Do you want to revise your answer here?………………………………….
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How did you get or develop
that understanding?
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Now, write some thoughts about how
you got the understanding you
identified. What did you do to develop
it?
Compare and revise
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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?
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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
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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
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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………
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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……..
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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!
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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?
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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?
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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…..
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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
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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
TfU Element Addressing each Question
What shall we teach?
Generative Topics
What is worth understanding?
Understanding Goals
How shall we teach for understanding?
Understanding Performances
How can students and teacher know what
students understand and how students can
develop deeper understanding?
Ongoing Assessment
Guidelines and conceptual categories
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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 3 rd 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
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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.