Sunday, May 2, 2010

What's the Big Idea: Teaching and Learning for Transfer

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mrpixure/3203850255/

“We teach it because they said we had to” is one of my professional pet peeves. It is my stance that, as professionals, unless we have clarity about the WHY of our learning goals, we should not be spending any time on them.

Many people know about Understanding by Design and/or Teaching for Understanding of Project Zero. Neither of these is a “program” or “template” but rather a paradigm for thinking and planning for learning that is focused on key principles of learning. Two key learning principles speak directly to this issue of being clear about the WHY of your learning goals:
1. Learning is purposeful and contextual. Therefore, students should be helped to see the purpose in what they are asked to learn. Learning should be framed by relevant questions, meaningful challenges, and authentic applications.
2. Experts organize or chunk their knowledge around transferable core concepts (“big ideas”) that guide their thinking about the domain and help them integrate new knowledge. Therefore, content instruction should be framed in terms of core ideas and transferrable processes, not as discrete facts and skills.
Copyright 2010 Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins

Ultimately if we’re not clear about the purpose or relevancy of our learning goals, we obviously can’t contextualize the learning for students. Also, if we are the facilitators responsible to guide students’ building of understanding, isn’t it therefore our responsibility to frame this learning around the key understandings (with related skills and knowledge) and clearly communicate the relevance of this learning?

Or better yet, might we be framing the big ideas, skills, and knowledge based on students’ questions and desires to explore?

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