Teaching for Deeper Learning

Tools to Engage Students in Meaning Making

Jay McTighe, Harvey F. Silver

• Publisher: ASCD
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781416628651
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Teaching Methods

Far too often, our students attain only a superficial level of knowledge that fails to prepare them for deeper challenges in school and beyond. In Teaching for Deeper Learning, renowned educators and best-selling authors Jay McTighe and Harvey F. Silver propose a solution: teaching students to make meaning for themselves.

Contending that the ability to "earn" understanding will equip students to thrive in school, at work, and in life, the authors highlight seven higher-order thinking skills that facilitate students' acquisition of information for greater retention, retrieval, and transfer. These skills, which cut across content areas and grade levels and are deeply embedded in current academic standards, separate high achievers from their low-performing peers.

Drawing on their deep well of research and experience, the authors - Explore what kind of content is worth having students make meaning about.
- Provide practical tools and strategies to help teachers target each of the seven thinking skills in the classroom.
- Explain how teachers can incorporate the thinking skills and tools into lesson and unit design.
- Show how teachers can build students' capacity to use the strategies independently.

If our goal is to prepare students to meet the rigorous demands of school, college, and career, then we must foster their ability to respond to such challenges. This comprehensive, practical guide will enable teachers to engage students in the kind of learning that yields enduring understanding and valuable skills that they can use throughout their lives.

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Chapter 1

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Framing Learning Around Big Ideas

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In the Introduction, we discussed the importance of actively engaging students in meaning making. In Chapters 2–8, we'll explore thinking skills and tools that can help students make meaning of the content we teach. But what should we be teaching in the first place? What's worth having students understand and make meaning about? How can we design our curriculum in a way that promotes deep learning and transfer?

To address these questions, we need to consider several factors that affect a modern-day education. A fundamental characteristic of our world is the fact that our collective knowledge base continues to increase rapidly, with estimated doubling times that are expressed in months rather than decades. Indeed, knowledge is expanding faster than we're able to absorb it. And the accompanying reality that ordinary people can now access much of that knowledge on a smartphone means that contemporary schooling no longer requires memorization of all pertinent information.

A related trend has to do with the rapidity, and related unpredictability, of changes in today's world. From technological advances (e.g., automation and artificial intelligence) to political and economic transformations, shifts in global migration patterns, and climatic change, it is fair to say that we are no longer educating learners for a stable and predictable world.

Focus on Big Ideas

Clearly, our world is changing dramatically—and the focus of our teaching needs to change in response. Attentiveness to trends like the ones described above has driven leading curriculum experts (Erickson, 2007, 2008; Wiggins & McTighe, 2005, 2011, 2012) to recommend that a modern curriculum be prioritized around a smaller number of conceptually larger, transferable ideas. They make this recommendation for four reasons:

1. There is simply too much information to be able to cover it all in school. The explosion of knowledge means that we can address only a relatively small amount of all possible content, especially in history and the STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering, and math). This makes it imperative to identify the big ideas that are essential for students to understand and to focus instruction accordingly.
2. Trying to cover too much content can result in superficial and disengaged learning. By contrast, when we focus on fewer but bigger ideas and transferable skills, we have more time to engage students actively in making meaning of those big ideas. Moreover, we can expand the use of performance tasks that involve students in applying their learning in authentic and meaningful ways, leading to deeper learning and transfer abilities.
3. An emphasis on larger ideas reflects our understanding of how knowledge is best structured for retention and use. Research on how experts' knowledge is organized relative to that of novices reveals that "[experts'] knowledge is not simply a list of facts and formulas that are relevant to their domain; instead, their knowledge is organized around core concepts or 'big ideas' that guide their thinking about their domains" (National Research Council, 2000, p. 36).
4. The rapid changes and unpredictability of the modern world call for learners who will be able to transfer their learning. Rote learning of factual information will not, by itself, equip learners to effectively apply it to new situations. Because transfer requires an understanding of broader concepts and generalizations, teaching for transfer requires focusing on conceptually bigger ideas.

Please note that our recommended emphasis on big ideas and transferable processes is not meant to minimize the importance of teaching basic skills or foundational knowledge. We simply propose that basic facts and skills should be treated as a means to greater ends—in other words, as raw material for developing the larger conceptual understandings that we want students to walk away with. It is noteworthy that the most recent generation of standards in the United States—including the Common Core State Standards, the Next Generation Science Standards, and the College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework for Social Studies—all emphasize teaching for deep understanding of larger concepts rather than superficially covering vast amounts of information.

Concept-Based Curriculum Design

The sheer volume of potential content and the corresponding problem of "mile-wide, inch-deep" curriculum require curriculum teams and individual teachers to be able to prioritize—that is, to determine the most important curricular outcomes, as well as the best use of available instructional time. By focusing curriculum around conceptually important and transferable ideas, teachers can go into greater depth to develop and deepen students' understanding rather than simply trying to cover large volumes of discrete facts.

In this chapter, we describe three approaches that teachers can use to frame curriculum and instruction around important ideas:

1. A Study In … encourages teachers to plan their units to focus on the key concepts to be understood rather than just topics, skills, or texts.
2. Concept Word Wall reminds teachers to identify the key concepts that will help students develop a deep understanding of the content—and to make those concepts visible in the classroom.
3. Essential Questions shows teachers how to frame their content around open-ended and thought-provoking questions that help students make meaning of and "uncover" the big ideas.

A Study In …

A simple yet effective way to ensure that an instructional unit maintains a conceptual focus rather than just addressing topics, basic skills, or activities is to frame it as "a study in" a larger, transferable concept or theme (Silver & Perini, 2010). Select an appropriate concept or theme (see Figure 1.1 for a list of possibilities), build it into your unit title, and use the selected concept to focus instruction over the course of the unit. Here are some examples of units that were framed in this manner:

• Argument Writing: A Study in Craftsmanship
• Impressionism: A Study in Revolution
• The Four Seasons: A Study in Change
• The Pentagon Papers: A Study in Deception
• Four Films by Hitchcock: A Study in Obsession
• Weight Training: A Study in Proper Technique
• Whole Numbers: A Study in Rules and Relationships
• Formal Versus Informal Forms of Address in Spanish: A Study in Respect

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Figure 1.1. Examples of Transferable Concepts and Themes

abundance/scarcity
acceptance/rejection
adaptation
balance
caring
cause and effect
challenge
change/continuity
character
communication
community
competition
composition
conflict
convergence
cooperation
correlation
courage
craftsmanship
creativity
culture
cycles
defense/protection
democracy
design
discovery
diversity
environment
equality/inequality
equilibrium
equivalence
ethics
evolution
exploitation
exploration
fairness
freedom
friendship
harmony
honor
interactions
interdependence
interpretation
invention
justice
liberty
loyalty
maturity
mood
movement
needs and wants
order
organization
parts and wholes
patriotism
patterns
perseverance
perspective
prejudice
production/consumption
relationships
renewal
repetition
representation
revolution
rhythm
structure and function
supply and demand
survival
symbiosis
systems
tyranny

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When deciding which concept to pick for a given unit, remember that there's no "correct" choice; the choice should be supportive of targeted standards and reflect whatever big idea or message you want to highlight. A team of English language arts (ELA) teachers, for example, considered framing a unit on argument writing as a study in perspective, a study in balance, or a study in persuasion—but ultimately decided on a study in craftsmanship because they wanted to emphasize the idea that crafting an argument takes care and skill. An art history teacher similarly considered different ways to frame a unit on Impressionism but went with "Impressionism: A Study in Revolution" because he felt that revolution best captured the central idea that he wanted students to understand and remember: that the Impressionists "overthrew" the established mode of painting and replaced it with one that was radically different in terms of both style and subject matter.

Note that the idea of framing learning around larger concepts and themes shouldn't be limited to teachers. In the next chapter, we'll show you how to use this tool to engage students in identifying concepts and themes that unite the factual information they learn in class.

Concept Word Wall

Another simple way to keep classroom instruction focused on big ideas is to create a Concept Word Wall. To do this, identify the concepts, themes, or processes that will be the focus of a unit of study and post them on a wall or bulletin board. The words you choose can be specific to that unit or related to your discipline as a whole, or larger concepts that have relevance across disciplines. Ideally, your wall would contain a mixture of all three. A word wall on food webs, for example, might include unit-specific concepts like producers and consumers, broader science-related concepts like ecosystem and energy, and universal concepts like renewal and cycle.

Posting core concepts in an easily visible location serves to keep them front and center in your mind as you teach; it also makes students aware of the big ideas that are important to define, pay attention to, and come to understand deeply. Once the words are up, refer to and interact with them regularly—and encourage students to do the same. Show students how the words on the wall function as "conceptual Velcro," holding the facts and details from the unit together. Visit (and have students visit) the wall to link specific details or examples to larger concepts, add definitions, and identify connections between concepts. Using the wall in this way helps to grow students' understanding of both the individual concepts and the unit topic as a whole.

Essential Questions

A third way of framing your curriculum around important ideas is to use essential questions (EQs). Essential questions are open-ended questions that reflect the big ideas we want our students to come to understand. Rather than being designed to yield a single or final "correct" answer, essential questions are designed to stimulate thinking, spark discussion and debate, and raise additional questions for further inquiry. As such, they support one of the primary goals of a modern education, which is "to awaken, not 'sto...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Praise
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Framing Learning Around Big Ideas
• 2. Conceptualizing
• 3. Note Making and Summarizing
• 4. Comparing
• 5. Reading for Understanding
• 6. Predicting and Hypothesizing
• 7. Visualizing and Graphic Representation
• 8. Perspective Taking and Empathizing
• 9. Putting It All Together
• References
• Related ASCD Resources
• About the Authors
• Copyright