Category Archives: Reference

“It is the duty of human understanding to understand that there are things which it cannot understand, and what those things are.”

Soren Kierkegaard

Journals

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

“As every historian of science in the last hundred years has pointed out, scientists use all sorts of aids and intuitions and stories and metaphors to help them in their quest of getting their speculative model to fit ‘nature’…. My physicist friends are fond of the remark that physics is 95 percent speculation and 5 percent observation. And they are very attached to the expression ‘physical intuition’ as something that ‘real’ physicists have: They are not just tied to observation and measurement but how to get around in the theory even without them.”

Jerome Bruner

The Culture of Education

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

“An important symptom of an emerging understanding is the capacity to represent a problem in a number of different ways and to approach its solution from varied vantage points; a single, rigid representation is unlikely to suffice.”

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 test of understanding involves neither repetition of information learned nor performance of practices mastered. Rather, it involves the appropriate application of concepts and principles to questions or problems that are nearly posed…. 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…attained.”

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.

“[By understanding] I mean simply a sufficient grasp of concepts, principles, or skills so that one can bring them to bear on new problems and situations, deciding in which ways one’s present competencies can suffice and in which ways one may require new skills or knowledge.”

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.

“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.