Understanding by design is an academic framework for designing curriculum units, assessments and instruction which tries to achieve understanding beginning with end goals in mind. The problem arises when understanding is defined. Most of the time, understanding and knowledge are confused or used as the same term. However, they are opposite. The aim of understanding is to use what learners have in memory but to go beyond the facts and approaches to use them mind fully. The ability needed to achieve this aim is transfer. It conveys what learners have learned to new and sometimes confusing settings. Transfer must be the aim of all teachers in schools in the sense students have to learn from their own and not from us.
There are two approaches, the traditional coverage and the uncoverage approach. The former is uneconomical because the acquired knowledge is going to be forgotten due to it has an unconnected set of facts which have a short life in memory. Teachers have the assumption that the more they cover, the more students will learn and the better students will do on their test. However this assumption is false. The latter approach digs below the surface to uncover core insights in order to endure learning in a flexible and adaptable way for the future.
The outcome of the concept understanding design is the backward design which is focused on the idea that the learning process should start after identifying the desired results and then work backwards evolving suitable methodologies.
Specification of what kind of assessment evidence is required if teachers will judge students’ understanding because correct answers do not mean understanding but misunderstanding. It is an attempted and plausible but unsuccessful transfer.
As a conclusion, the authors introduced an effective and engaging framework which includes us all.
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thx
ReplyDeletesp
Talking about having a short time in memory....
ReplyDeleteDo you remember that class we dealt with short term and long term memory and how information was stored in our brains? Well, your post reminded me of that theory, our mision is to facilitate our students the process of transfering information from their short term memory to the long term one in order to make it useful and usable.
How? i think the key word is meaningful information.
What do u think?
Thanks!
Regards,
Vicky
There is something that people always forget, it does not mind what do you do for living the problem is always the same, is does not matter how much work you do, what really matters is how well you do your job" (The most important is not quantity but quality").
ReplyDeleteThe phase "the more the best" is not worthly here.
'Going beyond the facts' is a good phrase to talk and clarify the main issues of the chapter.Conceptual clarity is another important keyword when trying to come to terms with understanding and what it implies. Likewise, transfer of knowledge is also another key concept you refer to .It is interesting to see how you have analysed the chapter and how you have summarized Johnson's key ideas and concepts, including his ideas as a framework for developing our teaching praxis.
ReplyDeleteDear Dove,
ReplyDelete"Transfer must be the aim of all teachers in schools in the sense students have to learn from their own and not from us". This is a bit of a strong statement I think. To say that they can't learn from us is erroneous. I think I get your point; they can learn from us a lot. The problem is that how and what you teach. The thing is that we need to guide them in such a way that, as you say, they can learn from themselves and became autonomous in their learning. I remember one of the things that MJ told us in methodology, that teachers are afraid of losing the control in the classroom by letting them do things. Now, from this point of view, we should be able to design and plan lessons from that basis through English. Hard, isn't it?
:) Claudio
I completely agree with you about the idea of “enduring learning”, because as you said, our job is to help our students to learn effectively and not to help them to forget easily anything they supposedly learned. Suitable strategies should be used by us (teachers) in order to get this significant aim. Through this aim we are not the only beneficiaries, but also our own students.
ReplyDeleteAngelina
"The more we cover the more our students learn" Why do some teachers believe this? it's necessary to understand it's not a matter of quantity but quality, and unfrotunately many teachers still focus more in the amount of the information they teach than in the "how" they teach it, and therefore the strategies used to accomplish our objectives.
ReplyDeleteIt's not an easy task considering the little time most teachers have, but not impossible if we really believe in what we do.
Scarlette
Hi Paloma,
ReplyDeleteThere are three things I'd like to mention from what you have pointed out.
When starting something in life, there should be an aim to pursue, as well as in a class. From the very beginning, we have to stablish what is going to be learnt, or why we are doing such and such thing. As you said, keeping and achieving the goals in mind, provides the guidelines which will lead to success in the processes.
I have taken two quotes from what you have written:
"The aim of understanding is to use what learners have in memory but to go beyond the facts and approaches to use them mind fully."
Clearly, memorising or just having easy exercises all the time don't get our students' minds working at their maximum capacity. Thus, they start rusting...
"Transfer must be the aim of all teachers in schools in the sense students have to learn from their own and not from us."
Basically, learner centred approach is what best summarises this. It is on us to make the change.
"Transfer must be the aim of all teachers in school". How? There are some key words that come to my mind (maybe from this learning period in the MA) meaningful, useful,autonomy, effective planning, student centred lessons.With these words I try to review what you posted Paloma, we as teacher have to provide the needed tools to prepare our students to be autonomous learners and provide REAL learning. Pretty hard, don't you think?
ReplyDeleteHi Paloma!
ReplyDeleteAutonomy is seen as something desirable to develop in our students. Teachers, then become the facilitators of the process. The problem is that nowadays the common tendency in most aspects of our everyday life is to give people everything solved. However our task is to develop this skill to make our students successful learners in the future, where they will be able to face and solve different situations.
I think some teachers think the more they cover the more the pupils learn is because thay have too many years in a system that promotes quantity and not quality.They do not know , maybe, the things that we know now.
ReplyDeleteThe current curriculum is vast and asks for aims that are not achievable in all students due a number of sociocultural factors and some teachers have no choice rather than follow the National Curriculum as it is presented just because the job requires to do so.
Dear Paloma,
ReplyDeleteIt is one of teachers' beliefs that the more contents we cover, the more students will learn and the better students will do on their test, yet there is no way that by providing a huge amount of vocabulary and a series of tenses our students results will improve. They will end up being confused and frustrated.
By organising the contents we help students to store and group the contents according to their needs.
I agree with you when you say that the notions of ‘understanding’ and ‘know’ are commonly confused and used as the same. However according to the article the term ‘understanding’ concerns with the development of abilities that allow the students to use what they have in mind in order to solve problems ( transfer), giving sense to what they learnt in class. Undoubtedly this is what we want to impart in our classroom, a flexible and meaningful learning which can survive in the future.
ReplyDeletePaloma clearly explains the concept of transfer. I totally agree with the idea that transfer should be an aim sought by all teachers. Nonetheless, I would also like to point out that this objective will never be achieved if teachers are left alone in this educational battle field. I particularly put it this way because teachers may be considered real heroes if they intend to achieve a more complex aim with large classes. Inevitably, if we teachers keep on having classes of 45 students, we will insist on the acquisition of knowledge rather than working on the transfer of this knowledge to other contexts. I might sound a bit pessimistic, but we will not be able to pursue any other objective different from knowledge unless we have smaller classes.
ReplyDeletePalomita:
ReplyDeleteI agree on this: "Understanding by design is an academic framework for designing curriculum units". Every participant should read this article before creating a new curriculum. It should be compulsory reading for all those teachers who want to be part of an institution. It is so sad to know that we (more or less 16 teachers in a cold classroom) are probably the only ones who conceive education in this way, and it is even more demanding to understand we have to educate people who have never been taught strategies to transferability before in their lives. It is a hard task, difficult, sometimes impossible; although, motivating and demanding. In our small classrooms we fight against the rest (teachers, school community, paradigms, etc.) to make our students aware of the world, knowledge and understanding.
Bye my dear!