Putting Understanding Up Front.

Abstract

A simple four-part framework gives teachers a language and strategy for enhancing their efforts to teach for greater understanding. In Braintree, Massachusetts, a mathematics teacher asks his students to design the floor plan of a community center, including dance areas and a place for a band. Why? Because the design involves several geometric shapes and a defined floor area. The students must use what they have studied about area to make an effective plan. In Newton, Massachusetts, a literature teacher asks her students to reflect on and write about their own growing-up process. Why? Because the students will soon be reading Their Eyes Were Watching God (by Zora Neale Hurston) and focusing on the central character’s development from child to adult. In Sudbury, Massachusetts, science students prepare presentations that explain their position on whether or not the President should sign an international environmental protection treaty. Why? Because creating these statements engages students in applying and evaluating a number of scientific perspectives concerning global warming. Anyone alert to current trends in teaching practice will not be surprised by such examples. They illustrate the committed effort to engage students more thoughtfully in subject-matter learning— drawing connections between students’ lives and the subject matter, between principles and practice, between past and present. Yet there is something different about the examples given—not what appears on the surface but what lies behind them. These three teachers created their plans with the help of a simple framework developed as part of an ongoing collaboration between teachers in the Boston area and researchers at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Members of the Teaching for Understanding Project, a fiveyear effort funded by the Spencer Foundation, have investigated the nature of understanding, developed an approach to teaching for understanding, and tested it in a variety of classroom situations over the past four years. In collaborations with 60 middle and high school teachers, we learned much from meeting together, developing curriculum, conducting experiments, observing and talking with students, and writing case studies. The results of this work are summarized in this article and the five that follow.

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