Teaching for Understanding with Technology

Martha Stone Wiske, Kristi Rennebohm Franz, Lisa Breit

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781118901748
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Teaching Methods

Teaching for Understanding with Technology shows how teachers can maximize the potential of new technologies to advance student learning and achievement. It uses the popular Teaching for Understanding framework that guides learners to think, analyze, solve problems, and make meaning of what they've learned. The book offers advice on tapping into a rich array of new technologies such as web information, online curricular information, and professional networks to research teaching topics, set learning goals, create innovative lesson plans, assess student understanding, and develop communities of learners.

Part One

Overview of Teaching for Understanding with Technology

Chapter 1

What Is Teaching for Understanding?

Figuring out how to take full advantage of new educational technologies is a complex process that goes beyond purchasing hardware and plugging it into a power source. And it is not accomplished by merely selecting appropriate software. Educational technologies are not like appliances that automatically do their jobs when the “power” button is pushed. Information and communication technologies such as calculators and computers, as well as networked technologies like e-mail and the World Wide Web, are interactive, rapidly evolving media with which to think and learn. They help to create collaborative social contexts for learning in ways not previously possible. As a result, effectively integrating new technology into educational practice is not just a matter of learning how to use the technology. It is also a process of reflecting on how technology-enhanced practices challenge assumptions about what and how to teach and how students can learn most effectively in today’s world.

Underestimating the complexity of this process and failing to support it adequately seems an almost universal shortcoming. Decision makers in school systems tend to buy hardware first, then make choices about software; only gradually do they realize that they must also help teachers learn how to use these new resources before the technology can significantly contribute to students’ educational experience. Only after these processes are in motion do educators, policymakers, parents, and other stakeholders usually recognize that they must connect their decisions about educational technologies to their priorities for education.1

If new technologies are going to lead to significant improvements in teaching and learning, the process of technology integration must be understood and undertaken as an educational process. Decisions about hardware, software, distribution of resources, curriculum design, and professional development should all be based on clear and explicit answers to fundamental educational questions: What should students come to understand? How can learning be promoted and assessed? What role should technologies play in these matters?

This chapter presents a systematic framework to guide the development of answers to these questions. The framework grew out of a sustained collaborative research project conducted from 1991 to 1997 by researchers at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, along with groups of effective teachers working in a range of subject matters and school contexts. The purpose of this project was to clarify the nature of understanding and then to define features of educational practices that helped students develop deep and flexible understanding. The Teaching for Understanding framework emerged as the researchers and teachers analyzed case studies of effective teaching practices in relation to current theories of cognition and instruction.

In the years since the Teaching for Understanding project published its findings and framework,2 this educational model has served as a structure for designing educational materials and activities in a wide variety of locations and types of settings throughout the United States and around the world: preschools, elementary and secondary schools, universities, and professional development programs. It has guided the design of curriculum and pedagogy in a range of educational initiatives, including efforts to improve teaching and learning through the integration of technology.3 The framework has proved to be an accessible model that is “roomy” enough to encourage professional judgment yet specific enough to guide educators’ progressive refinement of their work toward promoting effective understanding. Because of these qualities, it provides generally useful guidelines for designing education, as well as a framework with which to focus the integration of new technologies on learning.

What Is “Understanding”?

Any discussion of educational plans must be grounded in a conception of the ends or purposes of education. Schools have been expected to serve a range of purposes historically: cultural assimilation, civic preparation, economic development, academic achievement, and individual fulfillment. Currently, schools are also pressed to update their practices and to prepare both teachers and students for the twenty-first century, taking account of developments in new technologies and trends in global politics, economics, and cultural interactions. In the context of such complex and evolving goals, formulating a clear and compelling, yet flexible, conception of the purpose of education may seem impossible.

“Understanding,” as characterized by the Teaching for Understanding project, appears to provide a workable, specific yet generally applicable articulation of what schools ought to help students learn. After reviewing both educational research and the effective practices of teachers, the project defined understanding a topic as being “able to perform flexibly with the topic—to explain, justify, extrapolate, relate, and apply in ways that go beyond knowledge and routine skill. Understanding is a matter of being able to think and act flexibly with what you know.”4

Understanding as a “flexible performance capability” encompasses four dimensions: (1) knowledge of important concepts, (2) methods of disciplined reasoning and inquiry, (3) purposes and limitations of different domains of understanding, and (4) forms of expressing understanding for particular audiences.5 (See Chapter Four for examples.) This definition of understanding takes account of research showing that learning is an active process, not simply a matter of absorbing information or practicing basic skills. Demonstrations of understanding-as-performance require the learner to generate products or performances that go beyond reproducing received knowledge. At the same time, this conception of understanding honors the importance of mastering certain bodies of knowledge and methods of disciplined inquiry in domains such as history, mathematics, science, and language.

Defining the goal of education as a flexible capability to think and apply one’s knowledge carries implications for the process of learning and teaching. If understanding is demonstrated by performance, it follows that understanding is also developed by performances of understanding. Such performances require learners to stretch their minds, to think using what they have learned, and to apply their knowledge creatively and appropriately in a range of circumstances. The Teaching for Understanding project made “performances of understanding” the centerpiece of its framework.

What Is “Teaching for Understanding”?

Having defined understanding as a flexible performance capability, members of the Teaching for Understanding project proceeded to examine pedagogical practices that foster this kind of understanding in students. Their study included reviewing current research on learning and teaching, as well as analyzing examples of practices conducted by teachers of various subjects in middle and secondary schools.

Through multiple cycles of collaborative research that included writing case studies about particularly effective curriculum units and analyzing them in relation to theories of cognition and instruction, the project defined a model with four elements (listed in the next sections) that incorporate the characteristics of particularly effective teaching for understanding; these elements also help teachers design lessons by formulating answers for some basic questions that all educators must address:

• What topics are worth understanding?
• What exactly should students understand about such topics?
• How will students develop and demonstrate understanding?
• How will students and teachers assess understanding?

What Topics Are Worth Understanding?

From the panoply of possible topics encompassed by curriculum standards and required or recommended textbooks, how should teachers decide what to teach? Teaching for understanding requires that students make sense of what they learn, not just memorize facts and formulas. Therefore, curriculum should be organized around topics that are meaningful to students, as well as important to the subject matter. If understanding includes a capacity to think with what you know, it follows that curriculum topics should not simply be “covered” but “uncovered” in ways that invite continuing inquiry. Teachers are best able to guide inquiry around topics that they themselves find endlessly fascinating.

With all these factors in mind, the Teaching for Understanding project recommended that teachers organize curriculum around generative topics that have the four features mentioned earlier. The topics should be (1) connected to multiple important ideas within and across subject matters, (2) authentic, accessible, and interesting to students, (3) fascinating and compelling for the teacher, and (4) approachable through a variety of entry points and a range of available curriculum materials and technologies. Generative topics have a “bottomless” quality that generates and rewards continuing inquiry.

What Exactly Should Students Understand About These Topics?

Even very thoughtful and conscientious educators often struggle to define clearly and exactly just what they hope their students will come to understand. As long as these goals remain tacit, perhaps even for teachers themselves, students will be uncertain about what they should be striving to accomplish.

Teachers and students are better able to concentrate their efforts when understanding goals are clearly defined and publicly stated. Understanding goals should focus on big ideas that go beyond memorizing facts and rehearsing routine skills. They may address multiple dimensions of generative topics, including key concepts, disciplined modes of reasoning, underlying purposes for learning, and mastery of forms for expressing learning. Goals for a particular lesson are coherently connected to larger goals for a longer curriculum unit; unit goals, in turn, clearly connect to even larger term-long or year-long goals. The Teaching for Understanding project referred to such overarching goals as “throughlines,” because they serve like an actor’s throughline to shape and focus a whole strand of performances. A clear and coherent, nested set of goals helps both students and teachers focus on the core purposes of every aspect of the learning process.

In keeping with the emphasis on understanding as performance, understanding goals clarify what students will be able to do with their knowledge. Statements of goals usually include action verbs like appreciate, analyze, and explain rather than more passive phrasings such as know that, list, or correctly use. Understanding goals may require students to learn particular facts and to develop skills, but they also require students to think with this knowledge and apply it in creative ways.

How Will Students Develop and Demonstrate Understanding?

Performances of understanding are the means of developing and demonstrating understanding. They are the centerpiece of the Teaching for Understanding framework, and they should constitute a large portion of the work that students do. Such performances build students’ understanding of target goals and involve learners in activities that require creative thinking. In order to engage learners in such performances, teachers need to design a sequence of activities that start with introductory activities that build on students’ beginning interests and knowledge. Through a series of guided performances, teachers help students gradually acquire new knowledge, along with the ability to apply their knowledge in creating increasingly sophisticated products and performances. Students should then be able to work more independently of the teacher in producing a culminating performance that synthesizes multiple dimensions of their understanding. Effective teachers devise a range of performances that allow students to develop and apply different kinds of intelligences and modes of expression. Of course, some learning activities entail taking in new information from reading or presentations. Teaching for understanding requires, however, that students also engage frequently in activities that require them to think, not just memorize or practice routine skills.

How Will Students and Teachers Assess Learning?

Performances that develop and demonstrate students’ understanding also provide an occasion for assessment. And the Teaching for Understanding project found that effective teachers provide ongoing assessment, along with coaching, to help students gradually refine and improve performances of understanding. Unlike traditional assessments that are conducted at the end of a course to determine how well a student performed, ongoing assessments are conducted frequently throughout the process of learning. Their purpose is not only to gauge achievement but also to promote better performance by providing specific information about strengths, as well as suggestions for improvement.

In the Teaching for Understanding model, ongoing assessments are based on explicit criteria that relate directly to understanding goals. These criteria (or rubrics) are publicly shared early in the process of developing a performance so that students understand what they are trying to achieve. Indeed, teachers may invol...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Title
• Copyright
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• The Authors
• Part One: Overview of Teaching for Understanding with Technology
• Part Two: The Elements of the Teaching for Understanding Framework
• Part Three: Learning to Teach for Understanding
• Glossary
• Index