It's hard to understand understanding, Grant Wiggins told his General Session audience. Although people use the term understanding all the time, they don't know precisely what they mean by it.
Wiggins and his copresenter Jay McTighe are the developers of Understanding by Design, a new ASCD program that aims to help educators answer questions such as, What does understanding look like? and What counts as evidence of student understanding?
"Understanding and knowledge are not synonymous," Wiggins said. "A person can have a lot of knowledge but limited understanding. And sometimes, quite surprisingly, a student can have very limited knowledge and an in-depth set of insights that go to the core of the matter."
Conventional testing "makes the erroneous, unspoken assumption that there's a direct relationship between knowledge and understanding," Wiggins charged. "There's clearly a relationship between them, but so much of what's wrong with student assessment hinges on the fact that knowledge and understanding are different. Indeed, we might even say, radically, [that they are] somewhat independent of each other."
"We are not suggesting that you're always aiming at in-depth understanding," Wiggins said. Sometimes it's perfectly legitimate for the teacher's focus to be on development of discrete skills or recall of information. But if a teacher aims for understanding, what follows? Wiggins described six facets of understanding—explanation, interpretation, application, perspective, empathy, and self-knowledge—that teachers should address.
The first facet, explanation, calls for students to know not only what but also why and how, Wiggins said. To demonstrate this aspect of understanding, students must be able to explain and justify—as with a dissertation and defense. "As soon as I mention ‘oral exam,' people who worry about calendars freak out," Wiggins noted wryly. Another challenge, he added, is the fact that few rubrics reflect the growth of concept understanding as opposed to skill development.
Teachers can help students develop perspective, another facet of understanding, through strategies such as teaching U.S. history from a British textbook, Wiggins suggested, or helping students better grasp Euclidean geometry by teaching them some non-Euclidean geometry.
Another important element of Understanding by Design is the "Backward Design Process," explained Eleanor Reneé Rodriguez, an education consultant, at her conference session. Educators should identify desired results first (e.g., What do we want this 4th grader to be able to do at the end of this unit?) and then determine what assessment evidence would be acceptable proof of success. Only then should the teacher plan learning activities.
"In classrooms in general, we plan the learning experiences and instruction first," Rodriguez said. Teachers stick to their favorite units and subjects. With this approach, teachers tend to lose sight of what they're really aiming at. Noted Rodriguez: "If you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there."