Education of ENDURING UNDERSTANDING Creates an EVERLASTING IMPRESSION within LEARNERS.

Focusing for Enduring Understanding

I would like to discuss the idea of backward design, which comes from Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe’s excellent book Understanding by Design. Recall that backward design is a three-stage process, in which you as a teacher first identify your desired results for a class, then determine what would count as evidence that your students did or did not reach those results, and finally, design your learning experience around your desired results and evidence.

The idea behind backward design is simple, yet it’s something we find ourself relearning again and again. Even now, as we prep for the upcoming days, We focus on what we want our students to read, rather than what we want our students to understand.

I trust (hope?) that I am not the only one who needs gentle reminders about the value of designing curriculum around understanding. Wiggins and McTighe provide some guidelines on determining what it is we really want students to understand at the end of the course. With a new semester nearly upon us, it’s worth revisiting their suggestions. As much as we might be loathe to admit it, not everything we teach is of equal value. So Wiggins and McTighe propose prioritizing learning goals. Imagine three levels, or concentric rings:

represents knowledge “worth being familiar with” for students. This is broad-brush, big-picture knowledge; think of it as contextual knowledge. The middle ring encapsulates knowledge and skills that are “important to know and do.” You can think of this ring as prerequisites for mastering the material. And finally, the smallest ring, the inner ring, represents “enduring understanding”—the fundamental ideas you want to students to remember days and months and years later, even after they’ve forgotten the details of the course.To help filter the “worth being familiar with” from the “important” and “enduring understanding,” Wiggins and McTighe suggest four criteria:

“To what extent does the idea, topic, or process represent a ‘big idea’ having enduring value beyond the classroom?”

“To what extent does the idea, topic, or process reside at the heart of the discipline?”

“To what extent does the idea, topic, or process require uncoverage?”

“To what extent does the idea, topic, or process offer potential for engaging students?”

Note the word “uncoverage” here. I’ll explore the idea of uncoverage more fully in a future ProfHacker post, but for now think of uncoverage as the opposite of coverage. It’s depth over breadth. It’s not how much material we cover, it’s how deeply we uncover it, how deeply we dig down to the core principles or processes of our discipline, of which we want our students to have a lasting—enduring—understanding. In our model is "uncoverage." We have a natural way of learning material through discovery. That learning tends to go from working memory to long term memory and can be accessed for use in later learning. When a student wants to know an answer, they ask the question. Enduring understanding is something you want to stay in long term memory for later use.  When designing a learning environment that relies on principles connectivism, the instructor becomes the curator of knowledge, according to George Siemens (2010) and meaning is constructed socially. I don't think uncovering the idea takes place in isolation, but rather through connecting with others inside and outside the classroom. Through sharing, the conept emerges and becomes owned by those who construct it allowing for deeper meaning.

So to create this enduring knowledge, when reflecting on what needs to endure, when we design our classes, we need to look at ways to make deep learning happen by allowing knowledge to be uncovered by the student and perhaps creating opportunities for discovery through connecting to others.

ADOPT A CLEVER METHOD

Backward design has without doubt occurred to any teacher who was frustrated with the tedium and outcomes of the alternative and therefore hoped to short-circuit the process by some "clever" method. Such a "clever" method as backward design, however, supposes a retrospective view the teacher himself garnered by repeated attempts at forward design. Students simply do not have that experience. Thinking we can "give" them both a backward and forward experience is a fantasy--the forward experience is arduous enough for most students.

"The sooner you make your first one-hundred mistakes, the sooner you may begin to correct them" it has been said. I cannot save students from the learning process replete with its many fits and starts. I can cut to the chase and tell them what they must "ultimately" know from my all-seeing vantagepoint (note, however, that I use a decentered teaching method in which I do not pose myself as the 'talking head' in front of the classroom who is to tell students what they are to know). In doing so they will inevitably reduce the learning "process" to the "bottom-line," and myself along with it, experience has taught me.

Dividing the material into three levels of importance will--for my engineering and science students--immediately marginalize the two outer rings of material. No, I have found it is more effective to process from beginning to end and let them think everything in a (carefully selected!) textbook is important--with the caveat that two hours study out of class for each hour in class is a good guideline. 

What I have found useful is to make students aware that, simply because the course is a science course with 'factual' information, does not mean that everything in chapter three is cast in stone. By the time they cover chapter five, the material in chapter three may be recast in greater depth or detail, in retrospect. By the time chapter 10 is covered, previous chapters may take on a new meaning, but even more hopefully, the student will have a perspective on the course and the structure of the material that was far from obvious from the first day--even though I had knocked myself out many a year to "provide" them with MY perspective. MY perspective is borne out of years of teaching. They are not ready to hear it, don't really care to hear it, and are actually more ready to get into the pool and get their feet wet, unless, of course, I mislead them to believe there is an "easier" way to learn, or that half of what we are covering is "unimportant." Entertaining appealing alternatives usually backfires.

It is not to be forgotten that the same topics are, in a well-constructed curriculum, touched upon throughout the duration of four years more than once. A light may not come on in my class but when the topic is covered two years later in a different context, a better appreciation and understanding of the first time the topic emerged is cast retroactively. We fool ourselves if we think our individual course is an island detached from reinforcement from other courses.

"Enduring understanding" sounds appealing, along with traditional terminology such as "mastery" of the material. I am more hopeful that in putting their minds up against the material on a regular basis students benefit in many ways unforeseen to myself or to they themselves. "Teaching with objectives" as the inner ring of the concentric suggests, short-circuits those unforeseen benefits and, from my experience, reduces the classroom to "just tell us what we NEED to know."

What backward design does is for the teacher: it clarifies what the content of the course should be out of all the possible contents. It also makes it possible for the teacher to think coherently about the course. There's a hilarious discussion of this problem in a book on the graphic syllabus, about how students think when they read our syllabi. They don't see how everything fits together and we intuitively know that everything fits together. What backward design encourages the teacher to do is to make the connections explicit for the students. Textbooks, in fact, do not do it because they organize their material implicitly rather than explicitly. You could USE a textbook to get students to think about connections, but you'd have to do so actively anyway. In other words, backward design is a tool for the teacher to think with, and a technique for the students to learn with.

It is the nature of backward design to "make the connections explicit for the students" but also indicate "what backward design does is for the teacher" so is not clear to me what I may be misunderstanding here when I indicate that such activities do little for students based on my experience.

Frankly I don't think that meta-exercises such as these do much other than convince the teacher s/he is smarter than the student, and serve as vehicles to attempt to convince students of same. Maybe some teachers are looking for assurance of both.

Organize their material implicitly rather than explicitly." The concept-map of explicit connections...Making such a map, which is a form of "backward design" that makes linearly implicit chapter connections into an explicit "network" was, however, of little value to me. The precondition for such an exercise on my part was that I knew the material. I made this map since I was interested in faculty development strategies; familiarity with those strategies, however, simply made me familiar with strategies faculty developers use. It had no particular use to myself. Furthermore, I found the map to be of no value to the students as they paced through the individual chapters, and of just as little value toward the end of the course. (In fact, I find detriment in strategies such as "one minute papers" and other items which fail to call forth authentic student accountability other than nominally). Did it help students "see" how everything fit together in this particular course? No, it just let them know that where I was as an individual was not where they were as students. It is not clear to me that this is a benefit to them.

It remains is doubtful to my mind that the principal obstacle standing in the way of students to learning the material on a day-to-day basis is the failure to see how things fit together. But, then, I also think that appeals to lack of "relevancy" or "meaningfulness" of course content are poor excuses for not subordinating oneself to the material to be learned when one has chosen to enroll in the course.

If the perceived problem under discussion is that the teacher doesn't know the material, on the other hand, by all means s/he must learn it. If this is the case, however, s/he might best begin at a level lower than the metacognitive--more like the remedial, perhaps.

BE UPDATED BY BEING A LIFE LONG LEARNER.

All said, however, our differences in perspective may be as much discipline related as anything.The problem isn't that the teacher doesn't know the material. The problem is that the teacher learned the material so long ago that he or she doesn't remember the process of acquisition. Take reading, for instance. We all learned to read and do so fluently. However, if we were teaching reading, we wouldn't know what the students would be likely to find difficult or why they would find it difficult.

Now we're not teachers of reading, but of our subject matter. There are things we do as automatically as breathing in our disciplines. To use an example given by a colleague of mine in physics, when he has to think through a problem in motion, he works directly with the graphs ("the graphs are my element"). But students don't know how to do that; they want, in his words, "to watch the movie," that is, to turn the graph into a reenactment of the motion described in the graph. It won't help just to give them graph after graph and wonder why they don't "get" it. Some will intuit it, but the rest will have to be taught to think about the problem as the professor does. So the first step would be to think about what the students should understand, know, or be able to do at the end of the course (only the second of these is often tested in a classroom). The second step would be to think about what kind of final exercise would show the degree to which students have mastered what you want them to know.

Traditional assignments don't always do this. I heard a paper by an economist in which they checked the understanding of students of the concept of replacement cost (which they deemed an essential concept). The author then correlated the students' grades with their mastery of this and another concept, and there was no correlation. So clearly students didn't need to master these concepts to do well (and mastery of the concepts was no guarantee of doing well).

The third step is then to think about how to prepare the students to do well on the final exercise. I have found since I've begun thinking of my courses in this way that the quality of my students' work has improved greatly. This past semester in one of my courses, all of the students handed in college-level work for their final assignment. It wasn't all great work, but it was all college-level work (and some of it was excellent). I was also able to tell from the work how well each student was able to think like an historian.

BEGIN WITH TH E END IN MIND

This follows an ancient wisdom principle, perhaps most popularly termed as "Begin with the End in Mind," as Stephen Covey titled his first habit in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.  Covey explains the wisdom of seeking to live our entire lives this way: What do you want to be leaving behind, after you're gone? And we should practice it regularly on a more micro level. We should set goals first, and then decide how to test if the students have met the goals. Seems obvious and easy, until you look deeply at what you really mean by "understanding" something, and when you realize that the diversity of the students prior knowledge means that even the "goals" mean different things for different students.

An enduring understanding can be created using a simple formula:

concept – verb –concept...An enduring understanding is relational and is the relationship between two concepts joined by a powerful verb.

IT WILL REQUIRE OPERATING ON DATA AND MAKING INFERENCES AND SEEING PATTERNS TO ACHIEVE

?The essential question for a unit/study focus can be created from the enduring understanding by using either “How” or “Why” (e.g. in front of the enduring understanding)

?To create an enduring understanding, go to the subject document, your grade level and the overall expectation that you will be addressing in your teaching. Within each area you will find‘embedded concepts ’ or ‘processes’. Use a powerful verb to connect them and you will have created an enduring understanding. Transform this into an essential question to drive the unit by using either “How” or “Why ” in front of the enduring understanding . This question will shape and drive your teacher & student learning throughout the inquiry. Students will have multiple opportunities using Multiple means to demonstrate their thinking, knowledge and understanding in respect to the essential question . The ‘culminating task’ could link back to the essential Question and ask students to use everything that they have learned and experienced to try to answer the question. Note that the essential question is an inquiry based, higher level thinking question and we should therefore expect and accept differentiated responses. There will not be a single right response but there will be levelled responses of which the most successful might demonstrate: use of extended thinking, effective communication skills , and perhaps components of the success criteria/anchor Chart/rubric. Students should be given opportunities to demonstrate their thinking, knowledge and understanding using the Write-Say-Do ‘Universal Design Model’. Also, classrooms that develop and make use of co-Created anchor charts will further support successful student achievement.

?Use the essential question to inform your unit design: What knowledge & information will the students need to be able to answer the essential question ? Also, reflect on the skills they may require to be able to access the required information , and the major conceptual and procedural understanding that students must master to address the EQ and achieve the EU. By using an essential question you will stay focused on the coreconcepts, processes and understandings to be achieved in the unit.

?Design aculminating or summative task that is reflective of your essential question and that directly addresses it . Creating Enduring Understandings and Essential Questions (e.g. For a cross -curricular inquiry unit, begin designing your essential question by looking at the social studies/history /geography curriculum . Develop the unit based on an essential question(s). Cross reference other curriculum areas to make connections and create richer tasks . Design multiple assessment and evaluation tasks.

?Consider posting the essential question in your classroom before beginning a unit of study. This allows your students to know the expected learning before beginning the unit. Samples:

Kindergarten: A sense of identity/ creates a positive self image.

How/Why does a sense of identity create a positive self image?

Grade One: Relationships, rules and responsibilities / change over time.

How/Why do relationships, rules and responsibilities change over time?

Grade Two: Various cultures of individuals and groups / contribute to the local community. How/Why do various cultures of individuals and groups contribute to the local community?

Grade Three: Life in early settler communities / compared to the present day communities. How/Why does life in early settler communities compare to the present day communities?

Grade Four: Elements of medieval societies / relate to contemporary Indian communities. How/why do elements of medieval societies relate to contemporary Indian communities?

Grade Five : Innovations of early civilizations / influenced the modern world. How/Why do innovations of early civilizations influence the modern world?

Grade Six: Interactions between First Nations peoples and European explorers / created disagreements. How/Why did interactions between First Nations peoples and Indian explorers create disagreements?

Grade Seven: India of 1867 / compared to the India of today, politically and socially. How/Why does India of 1867 compare to the India of today, politically and socially?

Grade Eight:Factors affect migration, trends and patterns of migration in India. How/Why do factors affect migration, trends and patterns of migration in India?

Grade Nine: Regional differences in India / are illustrated through the concept of ecozone. How/Why are the regional differences in India illustrated through the concept of ecozone?

Grade Ten: Major local, national, and global forces and events / have influenced India’s policies and Indian identity since 1914. How/Why have major local, national and global forces and events influenced India’s policies and Indian identity since 1914?

?Some Possible Powerful /Hot Verbs (e.g. from Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy):

Affects

Interacts

Defines

Applies

Links

Creates

Influences

Reflects

Relates

Causes

Engenders

Demonstrates

?Some tips to creating /using inquiry based learning and essential questions : Align the inquiry with an established/known disciplinary concepts or character traits you wish to cultivate (e.g.)

Respect

Empathy

Teamwork

Responsibility

Kindness and Caring

Fairness

Honesty

Co-operation

Integrity

Perseverance

Get the students to select a hot verb (e.g. creates) and add it to the character trait (e.g. respect).

Enduring Understanding: Respect creates an atmosphere of trust and risk taking, Essential Question: How and in what forms does respect best create an atmosphere of trust and risk taking?

This exercise helps them to consider big ideas which can, over time and with many opportunities to be exposed to examples, begin to form an “enduring understanding”.If your school has developed a ‘shared responsibility model ’ (e.g. common commitment to best practice, collaboration and a continuum of learning), students will become Increasingly familiar with the idea of using inquiry-based learning /essential questions for meaningful and enduring understanding. With practice and support students can become active agents for learning as they participate in co-creating essential questions using the “concept -verb -concept” formula as well as independently using inquiry thinking in response to learning

• Firstly, .... all knowledge is tentative. We need to be prepared that whatever we teach as truth to our students today may be declared a falsehood tomorrow. There was a time when the very best minds believed that the earth was the center of the universe, that monarchs ruled by divine fiat, that people with darker skin pigmentation were inherently inferior, that women had prescribed domestic duties, and that children with disabilities were better educated in isolation from their “normal” peers – to name just a few. The idea that knowledge is temporary has several profound implications for curriculum and instruction. First of all it suggests that knowledge is not a noun but a verb, an exciting and stimulating process, an in tellectual adventure that generation after generation engage in and build upon. Even more importantly, the tentativeness of knowledge allows us to give equal time to what we don’t know – those intriguing mysteries that ever fail to captivate the curiosity of our students. It allows us to talk about how we tolerate and perhaps even come to appreciate uncertainty – a quality that Elliot Eisner (1998) finds woefully unappreciated in most schools. It also suggests that we need to approach our work as teachers with a degree of humility – always a good idea.
• Secondly,....there is altogether too much content to be taught. The rate at which human knowledge is expanding is nothing short of breathtaking. Experts estimate that the wealth of human knowledge is doubling in less than a year. (Other experts estimate that human ignorance is also expanding at a similar rate – particular ly in the field of wisdom). Certainly the knowledge we have acquired in the last decade about the human brain and how learning takes place is much greater than that accumulated in all the rest fhuman history combined. There is now simply too much content to fit into a curriculum. Therefore, it becomes vitally important that we critically prioritize what goes into the curriculum and be willing to make thoughtful judgments about what needs to be expunged. This is easier said than done as we always seem to be adding to the curriculum, but only very rarely weeding our garden.
• Thirdly,... the structure of the curriculum affects its outcome (or in the words of Marshal McCluhan ‘the medium affects the message’). If one of the goals of the curriculum is to promote an inquiry-based a pproach to learning, it would stand to reason that the curriculum would be designed around questions as opposed to knowledge statements, and that these questions would be central to what we want children to learn. In other words, the curriculum needs to be both thoughtful and thought-provoking. Very few students can resist genuinely thought-provoking questions. So, how does a constructivist approach to learning mesh with a standards-based curriculum and where does different iation fit into all of this? In fact, differentiated instruction and a standards-based curriculum are not only complementary but are essential to each othe r’s integrity and efficacy. A standards-based curriculum without differentiation renders what happens in the classroom merely standardized. The emphasis is on quality control and accountability, not on meeting the needs of the learners – particularly diverse learners. The voice of the student is lost nomatter how thoughtful and thought-provoking the curriculum.

On the other hand, differentiation without clear learning standards is a journey without a destination – a cord ial invitation that doesn’t provide a date, time or venue. Without learning standards, either classroom instruction become “activities-based” without conceptual substance or lesson plan objectives are individualized out of existence. Either way, the curriculum loses rigor and credibility. Rather than success for all, we have confusion and mediocrity for many. Clear and coherent learning standards need differentiation and vice versa. They support each other’s integrity. High quality curriculum insures that what we are focused on in the classroom is worthy of student time and attention; that the content is meaningful and relevant; and that our approaches are intellectually challenging. Differentiation, on the other hand, ensures that the invitation to access the high quality curriculum is extended to all learners.

• Tomlinson & Allan (2000) write: “We need to stress continually what best- practice curriculum and instruction look like, and then help teachers learn to differentiate it. Differentiation as a magic potion loses much, if not most, of its power, if what we differentiate is mediocre in quality... Excellent differentiated classrooms are excellent first and differentiated second (p.81).”

Backward Design

Backward design comes to us from the work of Wiggins & McTighe (1998) in their book Understanding by Design. It frames a logical three step process of lesson planning that starts with the outcome in mind. Steven Covey (1989) writes that “to begin with the end in mind means to start with a clear understanding of your destination. It means to know where you’re going so that you better understand where you are now so that the steps you take are always in the right direction.” Wiggins & McTighe identify three stages in backward design:

1.Identify desired results.

2.Determine acceptable evidence.

3.Plan learning experiences and instruction.

• The first stage may seem obvious, but our experience has shown that it is not a given in all classrooms. Many teachers start their planning with a textbook chapter, old-favorite activities or lesson plans that have been taught many times before. This often results in an activity-based learning experience that has little conceptual substance. This can also be the case when the integration of subjects (social studies, science, math and language arts) is arti ficially forced. Critics of linear models of lesson planning (John, 2006) such as backward design suggest that such models do not reflect the inherent complexity and dynamism of the classroom and that ends and means are isolated into successive steps rather than being seen as part of the same situation. Again, this criticism would seem to us to represent a false dichotomy. There is no necessary contradiction between a logical step-by-step approach to lesson preparation and the iterative, simultaneous creativity that is part and parcel of the real world of teacher unit planning. The former provides us with structure and accountability; the latter allows us to cater for the context of our specific classroom and our specific students. It is hard to argue with the logic of starting the planning process with the end in mind.

Primary concepts (big ideas), enduring understanding and essential questions are clearly aligned with assessments and learning activities.

?There are multiple ways to access and explore ideas.

?Students are permitted to demonstrate their learning in various ways.

?Assessment of understanding is anchored by “authentic performance tasks”, calling for application and explanation.

?All assessment (teacher, peer and self) in cludes clear criteria of evaluation. The teacher and the students share a common understanding of “high quality”.

?The design of the curriculum or unit of study enables students to revisit and rethink important idea s in order to deepentheir understanding.

?The teacher and students use a variety of resources which reflect different cultural backgrounds, reading levels, interests and approaches to learning.