Teaching For Understanding

1
Teaching For Understanding

• Cecilia Owens, Fay School
• March 2003

2
Putting It All Together
3
Looking At TFU

• What does it mean in theory and practice?
• How can it be a resource for teaching in the
  extended block?
• What are the concepts of TFU?

4
Before we begin

• Reflect on some things that you know well.
• How do you know that you understand these things
  well?
• What helped you to develop that understanding?
• Can we make some generalizations?

5
What is it? What is it not?

• It is a theory of understanding.
• It is a framework that lays out the essential
  ideas involved in teaching for understanding.
• It is not a script.

6
TFU Practices

• Engage students more thoughtfully.
• Draw connections between
• Life and subject matter
• Principles and practices
• Past, present, and future

7
Difficulty With TFU

• Teaching for Understanding is not a new concept.
• Tests dont support TFU.
• Enhancing understanding is only one factor.
• Also focus on self-esteem, etc.
• Question of what strategies best support TFU
  curriculum, activities, and assessment.

8
What is Understanding?

• Understanding is a matter of being able to do a
  variety of thought-provoking things with a topic,
  such as explaining, finding evidence and
  examples, generalizing, applying, analyzing, and
  representing the topic in new ways.
• Taken from Teaching For Understanding Guide

9
Understanding is a continuous process!

• While certainly there are breakthroughs and
  epiphanies as we develop understanding, virtually
  no one reaches a point where he or she
  understands everything there is to understand
  about a particular topic there are always more
  complex tasks to be completed, more applications
  and connections to be explored.
• It is best to set a particular level of
  understanding as the goal.

10
Moving on to the framework

• If understanding a topic means building up
  performances of understanding around that topic,
  then the mainstay of learning for understanding
  must be actually carrying out such performances.
• Taken from the Teaching For Understanding Guide

11
The Framework

• The framework makes it possible to look at
  practices through the understanding lens.
• Four key ideas
• 1. Generative Topics
• 2. Understanding Goals
• 3. Performances of Understanding
• 4. Ongoing Assessment

12
Generative Topics

• These topics, issues, themes, concepts, ideas,
  and so on that provide enough depth,
  significance, connections, and variety of
  perspective to support students development of
  powerful understandings. Typically they are
  interesting to students and teachers, central to
  one or more domains or disciplines, and
  accessible to students.

13
Understanding Goals

• Goals that identify the concepts, processes, and
  skills about which we want students to develop
  understanding. They are worded in two ways as
  statements (that can begin, Students will
  understand or Students will appreciate or
  Students will develop their understandings of)
  and as open-ended questions. There are two
  sizes of understanding goals unit-long and
  overarching understandings (also called
  Throughlines).

14
Performances of Understanding

• Activities that require students to use
  knowledge in new ways or situations. In such
  activities students reshape, expand on,
  extrapolate from, apply, and build on what they
  already know.
• The do NOT have to be performances.

15
Ongoing Assessment

• The continual process of providing students with
  clear responses to their work that will help them
  improve their performances of understanding.

16
Mapping With TFU

• Using the framework allows for more thoughtful
  and in-depth maps.
• Ask yourself not only what you are doing, but
  also why you are doing it.
• Examples

17
Final Thought

• Remember that understanding is a continuous
  process and therefore the understanding of
  understanding is a continuous process as well.
  There will always be another level to discover
  and unmask.

18

• The End!
• Thank you for sharing your time.