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TEACHING FOR
UNDERSTANDING
David Perkins
American Educator: The Professional Journal of the American
Federation of Teachers; v17 n3, pp. 8,28-35, Fall 1993.

In a small town near Boston, a teacher of mathematics asks his

students to design the floor plan of a community center, including
dance areas, a place for a band, and other elements. Why? Because
the floor plan involves several geometric shapes and a prescribed floor
area. The students must use what they have studied about area to
make a suitable plan.

In a city not far away, a teacher asks students to identify a time in

their lives when they had been treated unjustly and a time when they
had treated someone else unjustly. Why? Because the students will
soon start reading works of literature, including To Kill a Mockingbird,
that deal with issues of justice and who determines it. Making
connections with students' own lives is to be a theme throughout. In a
classroom in the Midwest, a student, using his own drawings explains
to a small group of peers how a certain predatory beetle mimics ants
in order to invade their nests and eat their eggs. Why? Each student
has an individual teaching responsibility for the group. Learning to
teach one another develops secure comprehension of their topics
(Brown, et al., in press). In an elementary school in Arizona, students
studying ancient Egypt produce a National Enquirer style, four-page
tabloid call King Tut's Chronicle. Headlines tease "Cleo in Trouble Once
Again?" Why? The format motivates the students and leads them to
synthesize and represent what they are learning (Fiske, 1991, pp.
157-8).

Quirky, perhaps, by the measure of traditional educational practice,

such episodes are not common in American classrooms. Neither are
they rare. The first two examples happen to reflect the work of
teachers collaborating with my colleagues and me in studies of
teaching for understanding. The second two are drawn from an
increasingly rich and varied literature. Anyone alert to current trends
in teaching practice will not be surprised. These cases illustrate a
growing effort to engage students more deeply and thoughtfully in
subject-matter learning. Connections are sought between students'
lives and the subject matter, between principles and practice, between
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the past and the present. Students are asked to think through
concepts and situations, rather than memorize and give back on the
quiz.

These days it seems old-fashioned to speak of bringing an apple to the

teacher. But each of these teachers deserves an apple. They are
stepping well beyond what most school boards, principals, and parents
normally require of teachers. They are teaching for understanding.
They want more from their students than remembering the formula for
the area of a trapezoid, or three key kinds of camouflage, or the date
of King Tut's reign, or the author of To Kill a Mockingbird. They want
students to understand what they are learning, not just to know about
it.

Wouldn't it be nice to offer the same apple to all teachers in all

schools? . . . an apple for education altogether. However, teaching for
understanding is not such an easy enterprise in many educational
settings. Nor is it always welcome. Teaching for understanding? . . .
the phrase has a nice sensible ring to it: Nice . . . but is it necessary?

Yes. It is absolutely necessary to achieve the most basic goal of

education: preparing students for further learning and more effective
functioning in their lives. In the paragraphs and pages to come, I
argue that teaching for understanding amounts to a central element of
any reasonable program of education. Moreover, once we pool insights
from the worlds of research and from educational practice, we
understand enough about both the nature of understanding and how
people learn for understanding to support a concerted and committed
effort to teach for understanding.

WHY EDUCATE FOR UNDERSTANDING?

Knowledge and skill have traditionally been the mainstays of American

education. We want students to be knowledgeable about history,
science, geography, and so on. We want students to be skillful in the
routines of arithmetic, the craft of writing, the use of foreign
languages. Achieving this is not easy, but we work hard at it.

So with knowledge and skill deserving plenty of concern and getting

plenty of attention, why pursue understanding? While there are several
reasons, one stands out: Knowledge and skill in themselves do not
guarantee understanding. People can acquire knowledge and routine
skills without understanding their basis or when to use them. And, by
and large, knowledge and skills that are not understood do students
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little good! What use can students make of the history or mathematics
they have learned unless they have understood it?

In the long term, education must aim for active use of knowledge and
skill (Perkins, 1992). Students garner knowledge and skill in schools so
that they can put them to work--in professional roles--scientist,
engineer, designer, doctor, businessperson, writer artist, musician--
and in lay roles--citizen, voter, parent--that require appreciation,
understanding, and judgment. Yet rote knowledge generally defies
active use, and routine skills often serve poorly because students do
not understand when to use them. In short, we must teach for
understanding in order to realize the long-term payoffs of education.

But maybe there is nothing that needs to be done. "If it ain't broke,
don't fix it." Perhaps students understand quite well the knowledge
and skills they are acquiring.

Unfortunately, research says otherwise. For instance, studies of

students' understanding of science and mathematics reveal numerous
and persistent shortfalls. Misconceptions in science range from
youngsters' confusions about whether the Earth is flat or in just what
way it is round, to college students' misconceptions about Newton's
laws (e.g., Clement, 1982, 1983; McCloskey, 1983; Nussbaum, 1985).
Misunderstandings in mathematics include diverse "malrules," where
students over-generalize rules for one operation and carry them over
inappropriately to another; difficulties in the use of ratios and
proportions; confusion about what algebraic equations really mean,
and more (e.g., Behr, Lesh, Post, and Silver, 1983; Clement, Lochhead
and Monk, 1981; Lochhead and Mestre, 1988; Resnick, 1987, 1992).

Although the humanistic subject matters might appear on the surface

less subject to misunderstanding than the technically challenging
science and mathematics, again research reveals that this is not true.
For instance, studies of students' reading abilities show that, while
they can read the words, they have difficulty interpreting and making
inferences from what they have read. Studies of writing show that
most students experience little success with formulating cogent
viewpoints well supported by arguments (National Assessment of
Educational Progress, 1981). Indeed, students tend to write essays in
a mode Bereiter and Scardamalia (1985) call "knowledge telling,"
simply writing out paragraph by paragraph what they know about a
topic rather than finding and expressing a viewpoint.
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Examinations of students' understanding of history reveal that they

suffer from problems such as "presentism" and "localism" (Carretero,
Pozo, and Asensio, 1989; Shelmit, 1980). For instance, students
pondering Truman's decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima
often are severely critical because of more recent history. Suffering
from "presentism," they have difficulty projecting themselves into the
era and pondering the issue in terms of what Truman knew at the
time. Yet such shifts of perspective are essential for understanding
history--and indeed for understanding other nations, cultures, and
ethnic groups today. Moreover, Gardner (1991) argues that students'
understanding of the humanistic subject matters is plagued by a
number of stereotypes--for instance those concerning racial, sexual,
and ethnic identity--that amount to misunderstandings of the human
condition in its variety.

So understanding is "broke" far more often than we can reasonably

tolerate. Moreover, we can do something about it. The time is ripe.
Cognitive science, educational psychology, and practical experience
with teachers and students put us in a position to teach for
understanding--and to teach teachers to teach for understanding
(Gardner, 1991; Perkins, 1986, 1992). As the following sections argue,
today, more than ever before, teaching for understanding is an
approachable agenda for education.

WHAT IS UNDERSTANDING?

At the heart of teaching for understanding lies a very basic question:

What is understanding? Ponder this query for a moment and you will
realize that good answers are not obvious. To draw a comparison, we
all have a reasonable conception of what knowing is. When a student
knows something, the student can bring it forth upon call--tell us the
knowledge or demonstrate the skill. But understanding something is a
more subtle matter. A student might be able to regurgitate reams of
facts and demonstrate routine skills with very little understanding.
Somehow, understanding goes beyond knowing. But how?

Clues can be found in this fantasy: Imagine a snowball fight in space.

Half a dozen astronauts in free fall arrange themselves in a circle. Each
has in hand a net bag full of snowballs. At the word "go" over their
radios, each starts to fire snowballs at the other astronauts. What will
happen? What is your prediction?

If you have some understanding of Newton's theory of motion, you

may predict that this snowball fight will not go very well. As the
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astronauts fire the snowballs, they will begin to move away from one
another: Firing a snowball forward pushes an astronaut backward.
Moreover, each astronaut who fires a snowball will start to spin with
the very motion of firing, because the astronaut's arm that hurls the
snowball is well away from the astronaut's center of gravity. It's
unlikely that anyone would hit anyone else even on the first shot,
because of starting to spin, and the astronauts would soon be too far
from one another to have any chance at all. So much for snowball
fights in space.

If making such predictions is a sign of understanding Newton's theory,

what is understanding in general? My colleagues and I at the Harvard
Graduate School of Education have analyzed the meaning of
understanding as a concept. We have examined views of
understanding in contemporary research and looked to the practices of
teachers with a knack for teaching for understanding. We have
formulated a conception of understanding consonant with these
several sources. We call it a "performance perspective" on
understanding. This perspective reflects the general spirit of
"constructivism" prominent in contemporary theories of learning (Duffy
and Jonassen, 1992) and offers a specific view of what learning for
understanding involves. This perspective helps to clarify what
understanding is and how to teach for understanding by making
explicit what has been implicit and making general what has been
phrased in more restricted ways (Gardner, 1991; Perkins, 1992).

In brief, this performance perspective says that understanding a topic

of study is a matter of being able to perform in a variety of thought-
demanding ways with the topic, for instance to: explain, muster
evidence, find examples, generalize, apply concepts, analogize,
represent in a new way, and so on. Suppose a student "knows"
Newtonian physics: The student can write down equations and apply
them to three or four routine types of textbook problems. In itself, this
is not convincing evidence that the student really understands the
theory. The student might simply be parroting the test and following
memorized routines for stock problems. But suppose the student can
make appropriate predictions about the snowball fight in space. This
goes beyond just knowing. Moreover, suppose the student can find
new examples of Newton's theory at work in everyday experience
(Why do football linemen need to be so big? So they will have high
inertia.) and make other extrapolations. The more thought-demanding
performances the student can display, the more confident we would be
that the student understands.
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In summary, understanding something is a matter of being able to

carry out a variety of "performances" concerning the topic--
performances like making predictions about the snowball fight in space
that show one's understanding and, at the same time, advance it by
encompassing new situations. We call such performances
"understanding performances" or "performances of understanding".

Understanding performances contrast with what students spend most

of their time doing. While understanding performances can be
immensely varied, by definition they must be thought-demanding;
they must take students beyond what they already know. Most
classroom activities are too routine to be understanding performances-
-spelling drills, true-and-false quizzes, arithmetic exercises, many
conventional essay questions, and so on. Such performances have
their importance too, of course. But they are not performances of
understanding; hence they do not do much to build understanding.

HOW CAN STUDENTS LEARN WITH UNDERSTANDING?

Given this performance perspective on understanding, how can

students learn with understanding? An important step toward an
answer comes from asking a related but different question: How do
you learn to roller skate? Certainly not just by reading instructions and
watching others, although these may help. Most centrally, you learn by
skating. And, if you are a good learner, not just by idle skating, but by
thoughtful skating where you pay attention to what you are doing--
capitalize on your strengths, figure out (perhaps with the help of a
coach) your weaknesses, and work on them.

It's the same with understanding. If understanding a topic means

building up performances of understanding around that topic, the
mainstay of learning for understanding must be actual engagement in
those performances. The learners must spend the larger part of their
time with activities that ask them to generalize, find new examples,
carry out applications, and work through other understanding
performances. And they must do so in a thoughtful way, with
appropriate feedback to help them perform better.

Notice how this performance view of learning for understanding

contrasts with another view one might have. It's all too easy to
conceive of learning with understanding as a matter of taking in
information with clarity. If only one listens carefully enough, then one
understands. But this idea of understanding as a matter of clarity
simply will not work Recall the example of Newton's theory of motion;
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you may listen carefully to the teacher and understand in the limited
sense of following what the teacher says as the teacher says it. But
this does not mean that you really understand in the more genuine
sense of appreciating these implications for situations the teacher did
not talk about. Learning for understanding requires not just taking in
what you hear, it requires thinking in a number of ways with what you
heard-- practicing and debugging your thinking until you can make the
right connections flexibly.

This becomes an especially urgent agenda when we think about how

youngsters typically spend most of their school time and homework
time. As noted earlier, most school activities are not understanding
performances: They are one or another kind of knowledge building or
routine skill building. Knowledge building and routine skill building are
important. But, as argued earlier, if knowledge and skills are not
understood, the student cannot make good use of them.

Moreover, when students do tackle understanding performances--

interpreting a poem, designing an experiment, or tracking a theme
through an historical period--there is often little guidance as to
criteria, little feedback before the final product to help them make it
better, or few occasions to stand back and reflect on their progress.

In summary, typical classrooms do not give a sufficient presence to

thoughtful engagement in understanding performances. To get the
understanding we want, we need to put understanding up front. And
that means putting thoughtful engagement in performances of
understanding up front!

HOW CAN WE TEACH FOR UNDERSTANDING?

We've looked at learning for understanding from the standpoint of the

learner. But what does learning for understanding mean from the
standpoint of the teacher? What does teaching for understanding
involve? While teaching for understanding is not terribly hard, it is not
terribly easy, either. Teaching for understanding is not simply another
way of teaching, just as manageable as the usual lecture-exercise-test
method. It involves genuinely more intricate classroom choreography.
To elaborate, here are six priorities for teachers who teach for
understanding:

1. Make learning a long-term, thinking-centered process.

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From the standpoint of the teacher, the message about performances

of understanding boils down to this: Teaching is less about what the
teacher does than about what the teacher gets the students to do. The
teacher must arrange for the students to think with and about the
ideas they are learning for an extended period of time, so that they
learn their way around a topic. Unless students are thinking with and
about the ideas they are learning for a while, they are not likely to
build up a flexible repertoire of performances of understanding.

Imagine, if you will, a period of weeks or even months committed to

some rich theme--the nature of life, the origin of revolutions, the art of
mathematical modeling. Imagine a group of students engaged over
time in a variety of understanding performances focused on that topic
and a few chosen goals. The students face progressively more subtle
but still accessible challenges. At the end there may be some
culminating understanding performance such as an essay or an
exhibition as in Theodore Sizer's ( 1984) concept of "essential
schools." Such a long term, thinking-centered process seems central to
building students' understanding.

2. Provide for rich ongoing assessment.

I emphasized earlier that students need criteria, feedback, and

opportunities for reflection in order to learn performances of
understanding well. Traditionally, assessment comes at the end of a
topic and focuses on grading and accountability. These are important
functions that need to be honored in many contexts. But they do not
serve students' immediate learning needs very well. To learn
effectively, students need criteria, feedback, and opportunities for
reflection from the beginning of any sequence of instruction (cf. Baron,
1990; Gifford and O'Connor, 1991; Perrone, 1991b).

This means that occasions of assessment should occur throughout the

learning process from beginning to end Sometimes they may involve
feedback from the teacher, sometimes from peers, sometimes from
students' self evaluation. Sometimes the teacher may give criteria,
sometimes engage students in defining their own criteria. While there
are many reasonable approaches to ongoing assessment, the constant
factor is the frequent focus on criteria, feedback, and reflection
throughout the learning process.

3. Support learning with powerful representations.

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Research shows that how information is represented can influence

enormously how well that information supports understanding
performances. For instance Richard Mayer (1989) has demonstrated
repeatedly that what he terms "conceptual models"--usually in the
form of diagrams with accompanying story lines carefully crafted
according to several principles--can help students to solve nonroutine
problems that ask them to apply new ideas in unexpected ways. For
another example, computer environments that show objects moving in
frictionless Newtonian ways we rarely encounter in the world can help
students understand what Newton's laws really say about the way
objects move (White, 1984). For yet another example, well-chosen
analogies often serve to illuminate concepts in science, history,
English, and other domains (e.g. Brown, 1989; Clement, 1991; Royer
and Cable, 1976).

Many of the conventional representations employed in schooling--for

instance, formal dictionary definitions of concepts or formal notational
representations as in Ohm's law, I = E/R--in themselves leave
students confused or only narrowly informed (Perkins and Unger, in
press). The teacher teaching for understanding needs to add more
imagistic, intuitive, and evocative representations to support students'
understanding performances. Besides supplying powerful
representations, teachers can often ask students to construct their
own representations, an understanding performance in itself.

4. Pay heed to developmental factors.

The theory devised by the seminal developmental psychologist Jean

Piaget averred that children's understanding was limited by the
general schemata they had evolved. For instance, children who had
not attained "formal operations" would find certain concepts
inaccessible--notions of control of variables and formal proof, for
example (Inhelder and Piaget, 1958). Many student teachers today
still learn this scheme and come to believe that fundamental aspects of
reasoning and understanding are lost on children until late
adolescence. They are unaware that 30 years of research have forced
fundamental revisions in the Piagetian conception. Again and again,
studies have shown that, under supportive conditions, children can
understand much more than was thought much earlier than was
thought.

The "neo-Piagetian" theories of Robbie Case (1985), Kurt Fischer

(1980), and others offer a better picture of intellectual development.
Understanding complex concepts may often depend on what Case calls
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a "central conceptual structure," i.e., certain patterns of quantitative

organization, narrative structure, and more that cut across disciplines
(Case, 1992). The right kind of instruction can help learners to attain
these central conceptual structures. More broadly, considerable
developmental research shows that complexity is a critical variable.
For several reasons, younger children cannot readily understand
concepts that involve two or three sources of variation at once, as in
concepts such as balance, density, or pressure (Case, 1985, 1992;
Fischer, 1980).

The picture of intellectual development emerging today is less

constrained, more nuanced, and ultimately more optimistic regarding
the prospects of education.

Teachers teaching for understanding do well to bear in mind factors

like complexity, but without rigid conceptions of what students can and
cannot learn at certain ages.

5. Induct students into the discipline.

Analyses of understanding emphasize that concepts and principles in a

discipline are not understood in isolation (Perkins, 1992; Perkins and
Simmons, 1988; Schwab, 1978). Grasping what a concept or principle
means depends in considerable part on recognizing how it functions
within the discipline. And this in turn requires developing a sense of
how the discipline works as a system of thought. For example, all
disciplines have ways of testing claims and mustering proof--but the
way that's done is often quite different from discipline to discipline. In
science, experiments can be conducted, but in history evidence must
be mined from the historical record. In literature, we look to the text
for evidence of an interpretation, but in mathematics we justify a
theorem by formal deduction from the givens.

Conventional teaching introduces students to plenty of facts, concepts,

and routines from a discipline such as mathematics, English, or
history. But it typically does much less to awaken students to the way
the discipline works--how one justifies, explains, solves problems, and
manages inquiry within the discipline. Yet in just such patterns of
thinking lie the performances of understanding that make up what it is
to understand those facts, concepts, and routines in a rich and
generative way. Accordingly, the teacher teaching for understanding
needs to undertake an extended mission of explicit consciousness
raising about the structure and logic of the disciplines taught.
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6. Teach for transfer.

Research shows that very often students do not carry over facts and
principles they acquire in one context into other contexts. They fail to
use in science class or at the supermarket the math they learned in
math class. They fail to apply the writing skills that they mastered in
English on a history essay. Knowledge tends to get glued to the
narrow circumstances of initial acquisition. If we want transfer of
learning from students--and we certainly do, because we want them to
be putting to work in diverse settings the understandings they acquire-
-we need to teach explicitly for transfer, helping students to make the
connections they otherwise might not make, and helping them to
cultivate mental habits of connection-making (Brown, 1989; Perkins
and Salomon, 1988; Salomon and Perkins, 1989).

Teaching for transfer is an agenda closely allied to teaching for

understanding. Indeed, an understanding performance virtually by
definition requires a modicum of transfer, because it asks the learner
to go beyond the information given, tackling some task of justification,
explanation, example-finding or the like that reaches further than
anything in the textbook or the lecture. Moreover, many
understanding performances transcend the boundaries of the topic, the
discipline, or the class room--applying school math to stock market
figures or perspectives on history to casting your vote in the current
election. Teachers teaching for a full and rich understanding need to
include understanding performances that reach well beyond the
obvious and conventional boundaries of the topic.

Certainly much more can be said about the art and craft of teaching
for understanding. However, this may suffice to make the case that
plenty can be done. Teachers need not feel paralyzed for lack of
means. On the contrary, a plethora of classroom moves suggest
themselves in service of building students' understanding. The teacher
who makes learning thinking-centered, arranges for rich ongoing
assessment, supports learning with powerful representations, pays
heed to developmental factors, inducts students into the disciplines
taught, and teaches for transfer far and wide has mobilized a powerful
armamentum for building students' understanding.

WHAT SHOULD WE TEACH FOR UNDERSTANDING?

Much can be said about how to teach for understanding. But the "how"
risks defining a hollow enterprise without dedicated attention to the
"what"--what's most worth students' efforts to understand?
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A while ago I found myself musing on this question: "When was the
last time I solved a quadratic equation?" Not your everyday
reminiscence, but a reasonable query for me. Mathematics figured
prominently in my precollege education, I took a technical doctoral
degree, I pursue the technical profession of cognitive psychology and
education, and occasionally I use technical mathematics, mostly
statistics. However, it's been a number of years since I've solved a
quadratic equation.

My math teacher in high school--a very good teacher--spent significant

time teaching me and the rest of the class about quadratic equations.
Almost everyone I know today learned how to handle quadratic
equations at some point. Yet most of these folks seem to have had
little use for them lately. Most have probably forgotten what they once
knew about them.

The problem is, for students not headed in certain technical directions,
quadratic equations are a poor investment in understanding. And the
problem is much larger than quadratic equations. A good deal of the
typical curriculum does not connect--not to practical applications, nor
to personal insights, nor to much of anything else. It's not the kind of
knowledge that would connect. Or it's not taught in a way that would
help learners to make connections. We suffer from a massive problem
of "quadratic education."

What's needed is a connected rather than a disconnected curriculum, a

curriculum full of knowledge of the right kind to connect richly to
future insights and applications (Perkins, 1986; Perrone, 1991a). The
great American philosopher and educator John Dewey (1916) had
something like this in mind when he wrote of "generative knowledge."
He wanted education to emphasize knowledge with rich ramifications
in the lives of learners. Knowledge worth understanding.

WHAT IS GENERATIVE KNOWLEDGE?

What does generative knowledge look like (cf. Perkins, 1986, 1992;
Perrone, 1991a)? Consider a cluster of mathematics concepts rather
different from quadratic equations. Consider probability and statistics.
The conventional precollege curriculum pays little attention to
probability and statistics. Yet statistical information is commonplace in
newspapers, magazines, and even newscasts. Probabilistic
considerations figure in many common areas of life, for instance
making informed decisions about medical treatment. The National
Council of Teachers of Mathematics (1989) urges more attention to
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probability and statistics in the standards established a few years ago.

Faced with a forced choice, one might do well to teach probability and
statistics for understanding instead of quadratic equations for
understanding. It's knowledge that connects!

Or for instance, early this year, the Boston Globe published a series on
"the roots of ethnic hatred," the psychology and sociology of why
ethnic groups from Northern Ireland to Bosnia to South Africa are so
often and so persistently at one another's throats. It turns out that a
good deal is known about the causes and dynamics of ethnic hatred.
To teach social studies for understanding, one might teach about the
roots of ethnic hatred instead of the French Revolution. Or one might
teach the French Revolution through the lens of the roots of ethnic
hatred. It's knowledge that connects!

TAPPING TEACHERS' WISDOM

Where are ideas for the knowledge in this "connected curriculum" to

come from? One rich source is teachers. In some recent meetings and
workshops, my colleagues and I have been exploring with teachers
some of their ideas about generative knowledge. The question was
this: "What new topic could I teach, or what spin could I put on a topic
I already teach, to make it genuinely generative? To offer something
that connects richly to the subject matter, to youngsters' concerns, to
recurring opportunities for insight or application?"

We heard some wonderful ideas. Here is a sample:

What is a living thing? Most of the universe is dead matter,

with a few precious enclaves of life. But what is life in its
essence? Are viruses alive? What about computer viruses (some
argue that they are)? What about crystals? If they are not, why
not?
Civil disobedience. This theme connects to adolescents'
concerns with rules and justice, to episodes of civil disobedience
in history and literature, and to one's role as a responsible
citizen in a nation, community, or, for that matter, a school.
RAP: ratio and proportion. Research shows that many
students have a poor grasp of this very central concept, a
concept that, like statistics and probability, comes up all the
time. Dull? Not necessarily. The teachers who suggested this
pointed out many surprising situations where ratio and
proportion enter--in poetry, music and musical notation, diet,
sports statistics, and so on.
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Whose history? It's been said that history gets written by the
victors. This theme addresses pointblank how accounts of history
get shaped by those who write it-- the victors, sometimes the
dissidents, and those with other special interests.

These examples drawn from teachers should persuade us that many

teachers have excellent intuitions about generative knowledge.

POWERFUL CONCEPTUAL SYSTEMS

It's important not to mix up generative knowledge with what's simply

fun or doggedly practical. We might think of the most generative
knowledge as a matter of powerful conceptual systems, systems of
concepts and examples that yield insight and implications in many
circumstances. Look back at the topics listed earlier. Yes, they can be
read as particular pieces of subject matter knowledge. But every one
also is a powerful conceptual system. Probability and statistics offer a
window on chance and trends in the world; the roots of ethnic hatred
reveal the dynamics of rivalry and prejudice at any level from
neighborhoods to nations; the nature of life becomes a more and more
central issue in this era of test tube babies and recombinant DNA
engineering; civil disobedience involves a subtle pattern of relations
between law, justice, and responsibility; ratio and proportion are
fundamental modes of description; the "whose history?" question
basically deals with the central human phenomenon of point-of-view.

If much of what we taught highlighted powerful conceptual systems,

there is every reason to think that youngsters would retain more,
understand more, and use more of what they learned. In summary,
teaching for understanding is much more than a matter of method--of
engaging students in understanding performances with frequent rich
feedback, powerful representations, and so on. Besides method, it is
also a matter of content--thoughtful selection of content that proves
genuinely generative for students. If we teach within and across
subject matters in ways that highlight powerful conceptual systems,
we will have a "connected curriculum"--one that equips and empowers
learners for the complex and challenging future they face.

WHAT NEEDS TO BE DONE?

At the outset, I called teaching for understanding an apple for

education. It's the apple, I've argued, that education needs. The apple
of course is the traditional Judeo-Christian symbol of knowledge and
understanding. It was Eden's apple that got us into trouble in the first
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place, and the trouble with apples continues. Our efforts to serve up to
students the apple of plain old knowledge seem to be serving them
poorly.

What it all comes down to is this. Schools are providing the wrong
apple. The apple of knowledge is not the apple that truly nourishes.
What we need is the apple of understanding (which of course includes
the requisite knowledge).

So what should be done? What does it take to organize education

around the apple of understanding rather than the apple of
knowledge? What energies must we muster in what direction to move
toward a more committed and pervasive pedagogy of understanding?

Although the problem is complex, we have been exploring pathways

toward such pedagogy in collaboration with a number of teachers. An
early discovery encouraged our efforts. We found that nearly every
teacher could testify to the importance of the goal. Teachers are all too
aware that their students often do not understand key concepts in
science, periods of history, works of literature, and so on, nearly as
well as they might. And most teachers are concerned about teaching
for understanding. They strive to explain clearly. They look for
opportunities to clarify. From time to time, they pose open-ended
tasks such as planning an experiment, interpreting a poem, or
critiquing television commercials that call for and build understanding.

Our teacher colleagues also helped us to realize that, in most settings,

understanding was only one of many agendas. While concerned about
teaching for understanding, most teachers distribute their effort more
or less evenly over that and a number of other objectives. Relatedly,
the institutions within which teachers work and the tests they prepare
their students for often offer little support for the enterprise of
teaching for understanding. In other words, as Theodore Sizer and
many others have urged in recent years, better education calls for a
simplification of agendas and a deepened emphasis on understanding
(Sizer, 1984). This in turn demands some restructuring of priorities (as
expressed by school boards, parents, and mandated tests) and of
schedules and curricula that work against teaching for understanding.

Finally, our teacher colleagues help us see that teaching for

understanding in a concerted and committed way calls for a depth of
technique that most teachers' initial training and ensuing experiences
have not provided. Thinking of instruction in terms of performances of
understanding, arranging ongoing assessment, tapping the potential of
Page 16

powerful representations--these have a very limited presence in

preservice and in-service teacher development. So a second strand of
any effort to make pedagogy of understanding real must be to help
teachers acquire such techniques.

Fortunately, many teachers are already far along the way toward
teaching for understanding, without any help from cognitive
psychologists or educational researchers. Indeed, some of our most
interesting work on teaching for understanding has been with teachers
who already do much of what the framework that we are developing
advocates. They are pleased to find that the framework validates their
work. And they tell us that the framework gives them a more precise
language and philosophy. It helps them to deepen their commitment
and sharpen the focus of their efforts.

Frankly, we should all be suspicious if the kind of teaching advocated

under the banner of teaching for understanding came as a surprise to
most teachers. Instead it should look familiar, a bigger and juicier
apple: "Yes, that's the kind of teaching I like to do--and sometimes
do." Teaching for understanding does not aim at radical burn-the-
bridges innovation, just more and better versions of the best we
usually see.

The ideas discussed here were developed with support from the
Spencer Foundation for research on teaching for understanding and
from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation for research
on thinking, for which I am grateful. Many of the ideas reflect
collaborative work with several good colleagues. I thank Rebecca
Simmons, one of those colleagues, for her helpful comments on a draft
of this paper.--D. P.

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David Perkins is co-director of Harvard Project Zero, a research center

for cognitive development, and senior research associate at the
Harvard Graduate School of Education. His most recent book is Smart
Schools: From Training Memories to Educating Minds (The Free Press,
1992). This article is based on the Elam Lecture he delivered at the
1993 Conference of The Educational Press Association of America.

Reprinted with permission from the Fall 1993 issue of the AMERICAN
EDUCATOR, the quarterly journal of the American Federation of
Teachers.