Monthly Archives: April 2019

“One of the principal organizing concepts in biology is the question, ‘What function does this thing serve?”—a question premised on the assumption that everything one finds in an organism serves some function or it probably would not have survived. Other general ideas are related to this question. The student who makes progress in biology learns to ask the question more and more subtly, to relate more and more things to it.”

Jerome Bruner

The Process of Education

Excerpted from: Wiggins, Grant, and Jay McTighe. Understanding by Design. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 1998.

“Let me suggest one answer [to the problem of going into depth and avoiding excessive coverage] that grew from what we have done. It is the use of the organizing conjecture. They serve two functions, one of them obvious: putting perspective back into the particulars. The second is less obvious and less surprising. The questions often seemed to serve as criteria for determining where [students] were getting and how well they were understanding.”

Jerome Bruner

Beyond the Information Given: Studies in the Psychology of Knowing

Excerpted from: Wiggins, Grant, and Jay McTighe. Understanding by Design. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 1998.

[In late 2002, as I considered entering the teaching profession, I was running an internet-based used and rare book business–also named Mark’s Text Terminal. It happened that I had several of Jerome Bruner’s books in stock, so I read them all. Encountering the quote below a second time, 16 years later, in my current rereading of Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe’s Understanding by Design, I was reminded of how resonant it was in the context of the way I was educated, and how it appeared to summarize the act of instructional design and delivery. Here it is for your consideration.]

“The curriculum of a subject should be determined by the most fundamental understanding that can be achieved of the underlying principles that give structure to a subject…. Teaching specific topics or skills without making clear their context in the broader fundamental structure of a field of knowledge is uneconomical…. An understanding of fundamental principles and ideas appears to be the main road to adequate transfer of training. To understand something as a specific instances of a more general case–which is what understanding a more fundamental structure means–is to have learned not only a specific thing but also a model for understanding other things like it that one may encounter.”

Jerome Bruner

The Process of Education

Excerpted from: Wiggins, Grant, and Jay McTighe. Understanding by Design. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 1998.