At Grant Wiggins’ talk Understanding Understanding, he reinforced the distinction between teaching for future success vs. teaching so students learn what is taught. Which method of teaching do you practice? Which is more important?
“When you’re a professor, it’s possible to go long stretches of time without knowing what’s going on in the heads of learners. When you’re lecturing all the time and never hearing from students, you have no sense of how transfer or misconception deficits are accumulating.” – Grant Wiggins, Understanding Understanding*, 3/26/2012 * HUID login required…
“Understanding is remembering in disguise. To get a student to understand, a teacher must ensure that the right ideas from the student’s long-term memory are pulled up…”. – Grant Wiggins, Understanding Understanding*, 3/26/2012 * HUID login required to view lecture video
“‘Understanding’ is looking at the vast array of outcomes and saying — that’s what we want students to get/know/do.” – Grant Wiggins, Understanding Understanding*, 3/26/2012 * HUID login required to view lecture video
“No matter what your course goals, you’re looking at competent understanding, not prompted academic responses. This is what all schooling should be about.” – Grant Wiggins, Understanding Understanding*, 3/26/2012 * HUID login required to view lecture video
“What is ‘understanding’ as a goal, and what does it demand of assessment and instruction? How can we achieve understanding (and other key educational goals) by design rather than by good fortune?” – Grant Wiggins, Understanding Understanding*, 3/26/2012 * HUID login required to view lecture video
In February, Departmental TF for Physics Jason Dowd wrote a review of the book Understand By Design. On March 26th, coauthor Grant Wiggins will be speaking to the Harvard teaching community about understanding ‘understanding’.
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