I
have a brother-in-law who is a dreamer and an inventor. His vocation is that of a computer
specialist, but his avocation is creating, transforming, and thinking outside
the box. He gets a great deal of energy
from deconstructing ideas (and physical items) and reconstructing them in
innovative ways. His grandest dream
involves a whole new kind of building.
It is one in which humans create part of the energy needed to power the facility. His plans include walking paths that generate
energy, solar power, fish farming, and hydroponics as part of a self-sustaining
restaurant and recreation center. Putting
together this concept required him to take many different ideas and reconfigure
them in whole new ways.
He
has ideas on a smaller scale as well. For
example, he created an air filtration system which combines live plants, charcoal,
and a small fan. He also built a
heavy-duty custom trailer that he pulls with his bike. The last time I talked to him, he had bought
a welder and was piecing together his own version of a recumbent bicycle. Perhaps he will use his new bike to pull a
previous invention, the collapsible canoe, behind him down to the river. It wouldn’t surprise me a bit. I know he rides his bike to work year round,
and he recently hauled home a dishwasher from Lowe’s on his bicycle trailer. (Check out the picture below and imagine a
trailer attached to the back.)
Actually,
I enjoy the way he thinks. He is always
looking at new possibilities and making unusual connections. His ideas have
merit and often cause me to pause and reconsider previous assumptions. And his enthusiasm is infectious.
Big Ideas and Enduring
Understanding: Transfer
I
tell you about my brother-in-law because he is the guy who soon came to mind as
I was learning about Stage 1 of Understanding by Design: Identify the Desired Results.
This
is what Wiggins and McTighe say about Stage 1:
Learning
priorities are established by long-term performance goals—what it is we want
students, in the end, to be able to do with what they have learned. The
bottom line is transfer. The point
of school is not to simply excel in each class, but to be able to use one’s
learning in other settings.
These
two educators urge us to see our priorities as going well beyond what will be
on the end of the unit test or final exam.
(Certainly these tests are important, but we need to start the process
with something bigger, something more audacious, in mind.) For this first stage of UbD, we need to
be—and to create—dreamers. In five or
ten years, what do we want students to be able to transfer to new situations well after the lesson, unit, and course
is only a faint memory? The answers to
this question are the Big Ideas and Enduring Understandings.
Knowing vs. Understanding
The
difference between knowing and understanding is at the heart of
this discussion. There are lots and lots
of “things” that we would like students to be familiar with and that are even important
for them to know. Big Ideas and Enduring
Understandings, however, require us to go beyond the level of knowing to identify those understandings
that are at the core of our content. The
understanding has to be deep enough
that students will be able transfer the learning to new situations and connect
the learning to other contents and to life.
This
doesn’t happen every day in every class.
It may not happen every week, but this level of understanding is
essential if we want students to transfer learning. When it does happen, it takes more than
memorization, telling, or coverage of content.
It takes finding ways for students to connect with something larger. In reading through the work of Wiggins and
McTighe, I found a variety of descriptions for the Big Ideas and Enduring
Understanding. Some are metaphors,
and others are more concrete definitions.
According
to the designers of UbD, Big Ideas and Enduring Understanding…
- Are “deliberate choices” about the “top priorities”
- Include concepts and skills that “connect the dots for learners”
- Become the “linchpin” that holds the wheel on the axle of student understanding
- Are knowledge and skills chosen for their “power to explain”
- Are not self-evident, but rather need to be “uncovered” so students see the “core of the subject”
- Require “teacher-led inquiry” and “student self-reflection”
Our Dreamers
We
need our students to be dreamers. It
doesn’t take long reading the paper or browsing the web newscasts to realize
that we are in desperate need of a generation of students who can deconstruct,
reconstruct, and co-construct ideas in order to create something new. We need creative and innovative thinking now
more than ever, with no end in sight.
We
are in a unique position to help develop this exact kind of thinker, but we
absolutely must start by helping students go beyond knowing to understanding. Our students must learn to look beyond the unit
tests and final exams in order to make independent and innovative connections. To help them in this process, UbD suggests at
least some of the time we must connect student learning to the Big Ideas and
Enduring Understandings that prepare them to create something new in the future. This “something new” might be an innovative
building, a different kind of bike, a folding canoe, or something as yet
unknowable. Whatever the innovation, it will
likely start as a series of connections to past learning, maybe learning that
took place in your classroom.
And
that, HSE, is a really big idea.
Have
a great week.
Phil
Kudos
this week to those of you who promoted the food drive with your kids. The canned goods are a mountain in our
lobby. A school-wide effort like this
helps in ways we may never know and people we may never meet. It also reminds us all that we do, indeed,
have much to be thankful for.
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