Tag Archives: professional development

“Generative topics have several key features: They are central to one of more disciplines or domains. They are interesting to students. They are accessible to student (there are lots of resources available to help students pursue the topic). There are multiple connections between them and students’ experiences both in and out of school. And perhaps most important, they are interesting to the teacher.”

Excerpted from: Blythe, Tina, et al. The Teaching for Understanding Guide. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1998.

“The quality of students’ understanding rests on their ability to master and use bodies of knowledge that are valued by their culture. More specifically, it rests on their ability to make productive use of the concepts, theories, narratives, and procedures available in such disparate domains as biology, history, and the arts. Students should be able to understand the humanly constructed nature of this knowledge and to draw on it to solve problems, create products, make decisions, and in the end transform the world around them. Put differently, students should use knowledge to engage in a repertoire of performances valued by the societies in which they live.”

Excerpted from: Wiske, Martha Stone, ed. Teaching for Understanding: Linking Research and Practice. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1998.

“Determining the content of curriculum is a thorny problem. Whose favorite ideas are addressed, whose interests are served, whose passions are engaged, who makes curriculum decisions, and how do we ensure that all students are comparably prepared? The history of previous efforts to teach for understanding, as Vito Perrone describes in Chapter One, reveals reveals some recurring features of curriculum designed to foster understanding. One is that curriculum the taught in school relates to the concerns and experiences that occupy students in their regular lives. Perrone argues that in order to make these connections between schoolwork and students’ daily lives, teachers must be primary decision makers about curriculum. Teachers must select the substance and adjust the shape of curriculum to meet the needs of their particular students. Another basic criterion for curriculum designed to promote understanding is that it does not simply impart information. Rather the curriculum must involve students in continuing spirals of inquiry that draw them from one set of answers to deeper questions and that reveal connections between the topic at hand and other fundamental ideas, questions, and problems. Yet teachers must balance these needs for curriculum tailored to particular groups of students and for open-ended inquiry with a concern for some degree of standardization, equity, and legitimacy. How should teachers choose and design curriculum that meets these various requirements?

This question occupied the Teaching for Understanding project and its group of university-based researchers and teachers from middle and high schools who taught a range of subject matters–history, mathematics, science, and English.They readily acknowledged Dewey’s idea of organizing curriculum around themes as a fruitful starting place. But the question of which topics to select remained. A list of generative topics for different subject matters would be too cumbersome. Instead of stipulating particular topics, this collaborative group set itself the task of defining criteria to help teachers identify and evaluate generative curricular topics?”

Excerpted from: Wiske, Martha Stone, ed. Teaching for Understanding: Linking Research and Practice. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1998.

“Just how much unknown stuff can a text have in it before a reader will just declare mental overload! and call it quits? This quantity surely varies depending on the reader’s attitude toward reading and motivation to understand that particular text. Still, studies have measured readers’ tolerance of unfamiliar vocabulary, and have estimated that readers need to know about 98% of the words for comfortable comprehension. That may sound high, but bear in mind that the paragraph you’re now reading has about 75 unique words. So 98% familiarity means that this and every paragraph like it would have one or two words that are unfamiliar to you.”

Excerpted from: Willingham, Daniel T. The Reading Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Understanding How the Mind Reads. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2017.