Do I really understand Understanding?

In my school in the U.S., our entire year of professional development last year revolved around the concepts proposed by Wiggens and McTighe in Understanding by Design. We participated in several days of workshops of how to design appropriate lessons using Backwards Design among other strategies, and indeed began many lessons with what exactly we wanted students to understand, and then worked backward to plan the details of how we wanted them to come to that understanding.

Of course, though we each had a copy of the book as a resource, in the normal breakneck pace of teaching, most of us never took the time to read it. So instead, what was presented briefly in those one day workshops we tried to integrate into our teaching strategies. Perhaps my mind was in another world at the time, but I don’t remember ever focusing on the concept of understanding understanding. The real difference between knowledge and understanding had never really occurred to me. Or at least I hadn’t really taken time to think about that difference. We, as teachers, obviously strive for those “Aha!” moments when a concept finally clicks for a student, but striving for those moments consciously is not usually a regular focus.

So what are the implications of this knowledge versus understanding concept for me? It means that I have been using inefficient and often incorrect teaching strategies in my classroom! Too many of my assessments have focused on facts or grammatical processes that the students “know” and can regurgitate in some form on a test. But asking them to use those facts as evidence of demonstrating their understanding is another story altogether.

Because of that, the concept that teaching for understanding is actually more efficient than teaching facts is extremely interesting to me. I think of the many times that I needed to re-teach the process of verb conjugation throughout the course of the year, being absolutely puzzled as to why, if the students knew how to do the process the first time around, they couldn’t apply that knowledge to the present verb in question. It was because in my teaching strategies, I failed to help students link that specific component of the language to others (and possibly because I was using only grammar exercises to teach Spanish, another error that I am quickly recognizing).

Here, then, is where the need for teaching students to transfer their knowledge comes in. How do we know that our students have actually mastered a concept? We can see the evidence of their understanding in their ability to transfer skills to a new task or challenge. I believe that the role of the teacher is essential here. It has been my experience that students can often times be taken aback, sometimes feeling absolutely clueless, when forced to apply what they have learned. By only asking students to demonstrate rote, memorized learning, we have unfortunately not given them the tools to confront such problems. It is my role to teach them how to use those skills to find a solution to an unknown situation.

But that concept in general, especially coming from someone whose learning was based on repetition, is challenging. The texts talks about the need to use “far fewer narrow prompts that are intended to elicit the “correct” answer to a familiar question,” (p. 49). Designing assessments whose answers are strictly right or wrong, that don’t allow for variation is certainly much easier than looking at assessment from the “big ideas” standpoint! However, it is the flexibility of explaining those big ideas that allows students the opportunity to truly demonstrate their understanding. Rather than asking students, for example, to fill in the blanks of a memorized conversational between Juan y Paulina, I might ask them to imagine meeting a new transfer student and to write a dialog of that first introductory conversation.

It has been interesting, and honestly quite humorous to reflect on how a student’s misunderstanding can be a basis for greater understanding. I think back to several times in class when various students would look at me with a perplexed look on their faces. While one student expressed his confusion and sometimes anger, as to why the word programa in the story carried the definite article el in front of it instead of la, I was secretly cheering inside that he was thinking critically and questioning the word usage at all! In other moments, I would find myself surprised at a question and think, usually out loud, “Huh. No, it’s not correctly written that way, but I can see why you would think that.” Knowing how they were processing the information was useful to me as the teacher, so that we could work through that misconception together, but it also showed me that they had arrived at a greater general understanding of a particular component of the language.

Though I feel like I have arrived at a better understanding of understanding¸ I am still left with some questions of the application of this concept. For instance, assessing student learning within a broader framework makes logical sense to me, but later assigning a grade for the evidence that students provide appears to be very challenging. Also, at some point, students must learn facts so that they can then apply them, and at least as part of the perspective of the high school where I was teaching, students deserve credit for the work they do related to these facts. So then, how do we strike a balance between assessing for factual knowledge and for understanding? I imagine doubts and questions, too, bring us to a greater understanding of understanding.