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TEACHING FOR UNDERSTANDING
Background
AIM's Approach: Understanding by Design
Backward Design
Enduring Understandings and Essential Questions
Meeting Local Curriculum Standards
Additional Resources
BACKGROUND
AIM pedagogy adapts the framework of Teaching for Understanding (TFU),
a term first coined by Howard Gardner and David Perkins at Harvard
Project Zero.
According to Harvard Project Zero, Teaching for Understanding is an educational
pedagogy that uses the following four questions as a foundation for
its framework:
AIM'S APPROACH: UNDERSTANDING BY DESIGN
AIM sees Teaching for Understanding as a process that helps teachers design
instruction that promotes understanding and student engagement rather than
rote learning and memorization.
To promote student understanding, AIM utilizes and adapts the Understanding
by Design approach to teaching and learning, as developed by Grant Wiggins
and Jay McTighe in their book of the same name.
Wiggins and Elliot Seif offer these Indicators
of Understanding to help teachers recognize what teaching for understanding
looks like classrooms. For example:
BACKWARD DESIGN
Wiggins and McTighe base their approach on a process called "backward design,"
which essentially means that you begin with an end in mind. The three
stages of the backward design process are these:
Go
here
for more on the backward design process.
ENDURING UNDERSTANDINGS AND ESSENTIAL QUESTIONS
Wiggins and McTighe urge that unit designs be based on an enduring understanding
that the teacher intends for students to gain from the experience. They
state that enduring understandings:
Additionally, Wiggins and McTighe observe that essential questions
provide an effective way of framing units of study, a course, or an entire
program of study. Essential questions may be characterized by what they
do:
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Go here for tips on writing enduring understandings
and essential questions.
Click here to view the Enduring Understanding,
Essential Questions, and Goals that guided participant experience
during one of AIM's 2003 Teaching for Understanding Institutes.
For more information on Wiggins and McTighe's conception of enduring
understandings and essential questions see Chapter
Two of Understanding by Design, "What is a Matter of Understanding?"
MEETING LOCAL CURRICULUM STANDARDS
Teachers usually talk about what they will do to teach, rather
than what students will do in order to develop and demonstrate
understanding. The student-driven design of AIM's Teaching for Understanding
process requires the teacher to first identify student learning needs
based on local curriculum standards and benchmarks and then develop
an instructional plan to meet those identified needs.
View a chart offering examples of
ways that standards can be transformed into enduring understandings
and essential questions.
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
Click here
to vist the Harvard Project Zero Teaching for Understanding Web site.
Visit the Understanding
by Design Exchange Web site for additional resources and materials.
See the AIM resources section
for material supporting AIM Key Design Element 1 (Rigorous and
developmentally responsive curriculum, instruction, and assessment), including
the topic of teaching for understanding.
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