Teaching for Understanding with Technology

Part One

Overview of Teaching for Understanding with Technology

Chapter 1

What Is Teaching for Understanding?

Figuring out how to take full advantage of new educational technologies is a complex process that goes beyond purchasing hardware and plugging it into a power source. And it is not accomplished by merely selecting appropriate software. Educational technologies are not like appliances that automatically do their jobs when the power button is pushed. Information and communication technologies such as calculators and computers, as well as networked technologies like e-mail and the World Wide Web, are interactive, rapidly evolving media with which to think and learn. They help to create collaborative social contexts for learning in ways not previously possible. As a result, effectively integrating new technology into educational practice is not just a matter of learning how to use the technology. It is also a process of reflecting on how technology-enhanced practices challenge assumptions about what and how to teach and how students can learn most effectively in today’s world.

Underestimating the complexity of this process and failing to support it adequately seems an almost universal shortcoming. Decision makers in school systems tend to buy hardware first, then make choices about software; only gradually do they realize that they must also help teachers learn how to use these new resources before the technology can significantly contribute to students’ educational experience. Only after these processes are in motion do educators, policymakers, parents, and other stakeholders usually recognize that they must connect their decisions about educational technologies to their priorities for education.¹

If new technologies are going to lead to significant improvements in teaching and learning, the process of technology integration must be understood and undertaken as an educational process. Decisions about hardware, software, distribution of resources, curriculum design, and professional development should all be based on clear and explicit answers to fundamental educational questions: What should students come to understand? How can learning be promoted and assessed? What role should technologies play in these matters?

This chapter presents a systematic framework to guide the development of answers to these questions. The framework grew out of a sustained collaborative research project conducted from 1991 to 1997 by researchers at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, along with groups of effective teachers working in a range of subject matters and school contexts. The purpose of this project was to clarify the nature of understanding and then to define features of educational practices that helped students develop deep and flexible understanding. The Teaching for Understanding framework emerged as the researchers and teachers analyzed case studies of effective teaching practices in relation to current theories of cognition and instruction.

In the years since the Teaching for Understanding project published its findings and framework,² this educational model has served as a structure for designing educational materials and activities in a wide variety of locations and types of settings throughout the United States and around the world: preschools, elementary and secondary schools, universities, and professional development programs. It has guided the design of curriculum and pedagogy in a range of educational initiatives, including efforts to improve teaching and learning through the integration of technology.³ The framework has proved to be an accessible model that is roomy enough to encourage professional judgment yet specific enough to guide educators’ progressive refinement of their work toward promoting effective understanding. Because of these qualities, it provides generally useful guidelines for designing education, as well as a framework with which to focus the integration of new technologies on learning.

What Is Understanding?

Any discussion of educational plans must be grounded in a conception of the ends or purposes of education. Schools have been expected to serve a range of purposes historically: cultural assimilation, civic preparation, economic development, academic achievement, and individual fulfillment. Currently, schools are also pressed to update their practices and to prepare both teachers and students for the twenty-first century, taking account of developments in new technologies and trends in global politics, economics, and cultural interactions. In the context of such complex and evolving goals, formulating a clear and compelling, yet flexible, conception of the purpose of education may seem impossible.

Understanding, as characterized by the Teaching for Understanding project, appears to provide a workable, specific yet generally applicable articulation of what schools ought to help students learn. After reviewing both educational research and the effective practices of teachers, the project defined understanding a topic as being able to perform flexibly with the topic—to explain, justify, extrapolate, relate, and apply in ways that go beyond knowledge and routine skill. Understanding is a matter of being able to think and act flexibly with what you know.⁴

Understanding as a flexible performance capability encompasses four dimensions: (1) knowledge of important concepts, (2) methods of disciplined reasoning and inquiry, (3) purposes and limitations of different domains of understanding, and (4) forms of expressing understanding for particular audiences.⁵ (See Chapter Four for examples.) This definition of understanding takes account of research showing that learning is an active process, not simply a matter of absorbing information or practicing basic skills. Demonstrations of understanding-as-performance require the learner to generate products or performances that go beyond reproducing received knowledge. At the same time, this conception of understanding honors the importance of mastering certain bodies of knowledge and methods of disciplined inquiry in domains such as history, mathematics, science, and language.

Defining the goal of education as a flexible capability to think and apply one’s knowledge carries implications for the process of learning and teaching. If understanding is demonstrated by performance, it follows that understanding is also developed by performances of understanding. Such performances require learners to stretch their minds, to think using what they have learned, and to apply their knowledge creatively and appropriately in a range of circumstances. The Teaching for Understanding project made performances of understanding the centerpiece of its framework.

What Is Teaching for Understanding?

Having defined understanding as a flexible performance capability, members of the Teaching for Understanding project proceeded to examine pedagogical practices that foster this kind of understanding in students. Their study included reviewing current research on learning and teaching, as well as analyzing examples of practices conducted by teachers of various subjects in middle and secondary schools.

Through multiple cycles of collaborative research that included writing case studies about particularly effective curriculum units and analyzing them in relation to theories of cognition and instruction, the project defined a model with four elements (listed in the next sections) that incorporate the characteristics of particularly effective teaching for understanding; these elements also help teachers design lessons by formulating answers for some basic questions that all educators must address:

What topics are worth understanding?

What exactly should students understand about such topics?

How will students develop and demonstrate understanding?

How will students and teachers assess understanding?

What Topics Are Worth Understanding?

From the panoply of possible topics encompassed by curriculum standards and required or recommended textbooks, how should teachers decide what to teach? Teaching for understanding requires that students make sense of what they learn, not just memorize facts and formulas. Therefore, curriculum should be organized around topics that are meaningful to students, as well as important to the subject matter. If understanding includes a capacity to think with what you know, it follows that curriculum topics should not simply be covered but uncovered in ways that invite continuing inquiry. Teachers are best able to guide inquiry around topics that they themselves find endlessly