Understanding by Design
November 20, 2010
Moving from the white tower of higher ed to elementary music teaching, I expected to find very little that was intellectually stimulating. For the most part, this has been true. One blip of interest, however, is a text that all the teachers at my school are studying: “Understanding by Design” (Wiggins and McTighe 2005). I am impressed with the intellectual depth and applicability of their project.
In a way they are really just reviving Dewey and Constructivism, but they are also reviving something like the notion of ‘faculty’ which I am intrigued with. They are doing this in the face of the push toward standardized curriculum and assessment, which is essentially behavioristically defined: students do things to show they have mastered material.
But we know that our own understanding is not the same as our assessed abilities. Understanding is a capability that is engendered through study, but is not assessed through performance of that study. Rather, by triangulation, as it were, we are able to assess a student’s understanding of a concept: not through mirroring the content at a later point, but by using understanding as a capability and applying it to different areas. Student synthesis can be evaluated by activities that are vastly different than the learning activity. This opens the potential for active learning without fear of poor assessment.
