Teaching for understanding.

1. Teaching for Understanding

2. The Teaching for Understanding Framework
focuses instruction on building disciplinary
understanding, rather than imparting
superficial knowledge.

3. Four elements are fundamental to this
approach:
• Generative topics,
• Understanding goals,
• Performances of understanding, and
• ongoing assessment.

4. This performance view of learning
encourages students to demonstrate their
understanding in the classroom and
extend it beyond the school setting.

5. Generative topics.
• Topics are selected because they are central
to a particular subject or discipline around
which a unit of instruction will be constructed.
EXAMPLES:
• leadership in history,
• numbers as tools in mathematics,
• creativity in the arts,
• balance in science, etc

6. • Generative topics engage and motivate
learners by inviting them to connect what
they already know to powerful disciplinary
or interdisciplinary understanding.

7. Understanding goals.
• The goals describe specifically what is
important for students to know or do in a
particular unit of instruction in relationship
to the generative topic.
• Goals may be drawn from
standards, curriculum documents, and
teacher experience.

8. • Goals begin with the statement “Students will
understand…” and might include such
phrases as “…how an author creates,
develops, and sustains suspense in a plot” or
“…the extent to which water affects the
environment.”
• Sharing goals with students (and possibly
supporting them to help formulate goals)
enables them to know what they are
expected to learn.

9. Performances of understanding.
• Students demonstrate their understanding
of the goals through sequenced learning
experience performances.
• Teachers craft performances to be more
challenging than ordinary activities and to
actively engage their students and require
higher order thinking skills.

10. • Performances of understanding provide
evidence of learning and also extend
understanding by requiring students to
actively engage in learning: to observe, to
make mistakes and correct them, to
practice with ideas, and to receive
feedback and revise.

11. Teaching with Performances of
Understanding
• As students are engaged in performances
of understanding, remind them of the
understanding goals the performance
should help them achieve.

12. • As students are engaged in performances
of understanding, try thinking yourself as a
“floating coach,” keeping general eye on
the progress of students and listening for
common questions, confusions, and
issues that should be addressed in large
group discussions.

13. • Ask students to explain their answer, to
give reasons, to offer supporting
evidence, to make predictions in the
process of discussion about written
reflection on the performances of
understanding.

14. • Provide students with criteria by which the
performances will be assessed and give
them opportunities (especially in more
complex performances) to asses their own
and others’ work and then to revise it
before handing in a final product.

15. Ongoing assessment.
• Students and teachers use assessments
to look for evidence of understanding of
one or more of the goals.
• Assessment refocuses instruction on the
goals and provides feedback that can be
used to improve student work.

16. • Teachers assess students during important
performances throughout the unit, rather than
the more typical “too little, too late” single
assessment conducted only at a unit’s
conclusion.
• Assessments may be informal or formal.
• They can be self-assessments or may be
conducted by teachers, outside experts, or
peers.

17. • The evidence an assessor is looking for is
specified in criteria that identify “quality”
work—criteria that students may help
develop.
• When known by students at the outset of an
important performance of understanding, the
criteria guide students’ work and focus their
attention on what they need to accomplish to
demonstrate high-level understanding.

18. Questions for Refining Performances of
Understanding
• Do they require students to demonstrate
the understanding stated in your
understanding goals?
• Do they call for students to apply learning
in new situations?
• Do they allow students to build and
demonstrate understanding?

19. • Do the challenge students’
misconceptions, stereotypes, and tendencies
toward rigid thinking?
• Are they sequenced so that students can
engage in them throughout the unit, from
beginning to end?
• Do they allow students to demonstrate their
understanding in a variety of ways (written
work, artistic endeavors, and so on)?

20. • Are all the Understanding Performances
events in which students are creatively
thinking and doing with their knowledge?
• Are the Understanding Performances
student-focused and organized in the
sequence: Exploring, Guided Inquiry, and
Final Project of Synthesis?
• Are the Understanding performances well
mapped to your Understanding Goals?