“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.”
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.
“It is opinion that suppresses questions. Opinion has a curious tendency to propagate itself…to question means to lay open a place in the open. As against the fixity of opinions, questioning makes the object and its possibilities fluid. A person skilled in the ‘art’ of questioning is a person who can prevent questions from being suppressed by the dominant opinion…. Only a person who has questions can have [understanding].”
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
Excerpted from: Wiggins, Grant, and Jay McTighe. Understanding by Design. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 1998.
In response to student demand, I’ve been producing a lot of new reading and comprehension worksheets on health-related topics. In the course of this work, I typed up this reading on developmental delay and its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. I haven’t had any specific requests for the topic. However, once I write one of these, a student, to my persistent surprise, will ask to read the text and complete the worksheet. Indeed, it never ceases to amaze me that kids will take an interest in the very last thing I expect them to.
In any case, this is also a potential topic for a professional development roundtable of some sort, so I tagged it accordingly.
If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
Posted in Essays/Readings, Independent Practice, Social Sciences, Worksheets
Tagged building vocabulary/conceptual knowledge, cognition/learning/understanding, diction/grammar/style/usage, health, high-interest materials, professional development, questioning/inquiry, readings/research, social-emotional learning
“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.”
Excerpted from: Wiggins, Grant, and Jay McTighe. Understanding by Design. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 1998.
“Certain subjects yield to a general power that may applied in any direction and should be studied by all.”
John Locke (1632-1704)
Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.
“Ever since William Empson published Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930) this term has had some weight and importance in critical evaluation. In brief, Empson’s theory was that things are not often what they seem, that words connote at least as much as they denote—and very often more. Empson explained thus: ‘We call it ambiguous…when we recognize that there should be a puzzle as to what the author meant, in that alternative views might be taken without sheer misreading….An ambiguity, in ordinary speech, means something very pronounced, and as a rule witty or deceitful.’ He uses every word in an extended sense and finds relevance in any ‘verbal nuance, however slight, which gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of language.’ ‘The machinations of ambiguity,’ he says, ‘are among the very roots of poetry.’
He distinguishes seven main types, which may summarized as follows:
In varying degrees, Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poem The Bugler’s First Communion exemplifies all seven types.”
Excerpted from: Cuddon, J.A. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. New York: Penguin, 1992.
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