Category Archives: Quotes

“No experience is educative that does not tend both to knowledge of more facts and entertaining of more ideas and to a better, a more orderly arrangement of them…. Experiences in order to be educative, must lead out into an expanding world of subject matter…. This condition is satisfied only as long as the educator views teaching and learning as a continuous process of reconstruction of experience.”

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

“We thus uncover for students what is interesting and vital by revealing it for what it is: a shorthand phrase for the result of inquiries, problems, and arguments, not a self-evident fact. A course design based on textbook coverage only will likely leave students with inert phrases and an erroneous view of how arguable or hard-won knowledge has been. Rather, students need to experience what scholars know if they are to understand their work: how key facts and principles are the revealing and powerful fruit of pondering, testing, shaping, and rethinking of experience….”

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

[The “exit ticket” was all the rage in the last school in which I served in New York City. The peculiarity of the term notwithstanding, the concept is pedagogically sound—particularly when questions are both broad and focused, like these two, which are apparently in common use in classrooms at Harvard.]

1. What is the big point you learned in class today?
2. What is the main unanswered question you leave class with today?

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

“Whereas short-answer tests and oral responses in classes can provide clues to student understanding, it is generally necessary to look more deeply…. For these purposes, new and unfamiliar problems, followed by open-ended clinical interviews or careful observations, provide the best way of establishing the degree of understanding obtained.”

Howard Gardner

The Unschooled Mind: How Children Think and How Schools Should Teach

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

The Central Park East Habits of Mind

From whose viewpoint are we seeing or reading or hearing? From what angle or perspective?

1. How do we know when we know? What’s the evidence, and how reliable is it?
2. How are things, events, or people connected to each other? What is the cause and what is the effect? How do they fit together?
3. What’s new and what’s old? Have we run across this idea before?
4. So what? Why does it matter? What does it all mean?

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