Teachers spend about 80 percent of instructional time focusing at "the topic- and fact-based level," said Lynn Erickson, a consultant and author who specializes in curriculum design. "When I look at the questions that teachers design to get kids to think about their curriculum," she noted, "so often the questions are 'what' questions directly related to the topic, rather than questions that get the kids to think beyond [facts] to the bigger, more transferable understandings."
Lynn Erickson
Rather than focusing on topics and facts, teachers should "teach to the level of the enduring understandings, and start to think about topics as a tool to help kids get deeper understanding of concepts and those big ideas that transfer," Erickson urged.
What does this approach look like in practice? "If I'm a 4th grade teacher and I'm teaching about the westward movement, I can teach lots of facts," Erickson said. "I can teach that early American settlers migrated to the West, I can teach that they looked for new opportunities and greater freedom—but I'm also teaching some very important concepts in social studies: the concepts of migration, needs, opportunity, and freedom." It's more important for students to grasp these big concepts, which transcend any particular historical context, than to remember lots of facts, she argued.
"The facts are locked into a [historical] time, but if kids start to build a conceptual schema in the brain for concepts that structure all of those factual examples, we're giving them a tool for lifelong learning," Erickson said. "This building of conceptual structures in the brain has to start in kindergarten or even before, and we need to keep nurturing that, just as we nurture skills and factual knowledge."
If students grasp the big idea that people migrate to meet a variety of needs, for example, then "the next time they see a migrating group, it gives them a place to start thinking about it by attaching new knowledge to what they already know," Erickson said. "And they start to ask questions about the new group. Why did the Hmong migrate to America? Why did the Russians migrate to America at the end of the Cold War? Every time they meet a new group, they deepen their understanding of the concept of migration."
Until we examine our standards and identify the transferable understandings behind the factual content, we're not really teaching for transfer, Erickson said. "If we treat each factual example as an isolated event, and don't help kids build it into that conceptual structure, then we're not really helping them process and analyze new information at deeper levels."