Chapter 2 Understanding Understanding: “Going beyond the information given”

At the end of the previous summary I expressed how confused I felt with the word “understanding”. Well, Chapter 2 offers the reader an interesting analysis and examples to support the meaning of “understanding” and “knowledge”. Understanding is the ability to infer messages, to apply facts, to transfer what I learned to new and different situations and to judge when to use and when no to use what I know. Bruner’s famous phrase expresses it properly: “going beyond the information given”. By the other hand, knowledge is a set of facts, skills and procedures that can be learned by heart. We need knowledge to have understanding. We need concrete facts before applying them in new settings. Even though both terms can be used interchangeably, it is necessary to understand the difference. This chapter also provides information related to student misunderstanding and how helpful this could be if we learn from it. In fact, this chapter teaches us that student’s misunderstandings are the result of an unsuccessful transfer of understanding and not the lack of knowledge.

I found quite interesting what Whitehead expressed about “inert ideas”: “Education with inert ideas is not only useless it is above all things harmful”. When a teacher tries to cover many contents, the result will probably be like this one. We must pay attention to inert ideas in order to avoid negative consequences. 

I always say that I want my students to be autonomous learners and I realized that I haven’t probably well understood this concept until now. Students can become autonomous learners if we teach them how to learn on their own. This implies to teach them how to transfer understanding to real-life situations. On the contrary, teachers reteach old contents. I think of the last test I wrote and I realized that I have only measured my students’ learning ability to memorize. Another big challenge to overcome.

I was trying to think how I can make my students apply the previous knowledge to check their understanding. The solution is probably right in front of our eyes. When introducing a new learning objective, we must give some opportunities to make our students apply what they’ve learned in previous lessons but in a completely different context.

Now I will wait for Chapter 7 to discover “core tasks”. Apparently the book will provide evidence to create new ways of testing and assessing students with the objective of helping them to develop abilities to extract understandings and apply them in different settings. We have a real challenge not only to design for understanding but also to assess for understanding.

Understanding by Design: Introduction and Chapter 1

“Teachers are designers” is the starting point for Chapter 1 of this book “Understanding by Design” that purports to provide a new perspective for transferring understandings to students while empowering teachers to actually create and “design” the way their students will achieve the desired learning results. With that powerful sentence, this book introduces a totally brand new method to design teaching lessons. UbD gives a clear description to convince teachers that they can effectively focus on better student performance, which is at the end, the purpose of design. Teachers can have an appealing idea about the contents of the book, the varied and “intelligent” tools it offers and how effective the final product will be if teachers follow three essential stages: Identify desired results, determine acceptable evidence and plan learning experiences and instructions.

UbD is friendly and quite easy to read. However, to put it into practice is a real challenge even if I consider that I have practiced one of the twin sins described in the book. I realized that I am an activity-centered teacher. Most of the times I focus on finding funny activities instead of setting clear learning objectives. Besides the previous fact, another important point caught my attention: the idea of thinking about the assessments before deciding what and how I will teach. This is far from my common practice. For this purpose, the templates included in the book are a wonderful tool to make the correct questions before designing objectives, assessments and learning activities. Finally, I think that UbD gives a great opportunity to collaborative work because it fosters peer review and professional development aiming quality control and improvement.

Now that I have to design units for my students from 4^th to 7^th grade, I will try to do it using “backward design”. Nonetheless, I feel just as confused as Bob James…asking myself what understanding really is in this context…I will continue reading and then I will tell you if I got the answer.