恭喜恭喜 恭喜恭喜 GGōngxǐ ōngxǐ

Yan-Fei Li, Jukay Lu, Yan-Fei Li, Jukay Lu, MingMing Zhang, Jingya ZhongMingMing Zhang, Jingya Zhong

Happy New YearHappy New Year

Xīn NiXīn Niáán n HǎoHǎo

新 年 好新 年 好

Understanding by DesignChapter 10

Teaching for understanding

by Yanfei Li, Jukay Lu,

MingMing Zhang, Jingya Zhong

The Textbook &

Teaching for Understanding

• Myths about textbook:– Friend or Foe?– Coverage or Uncoverage?– Map or Guidebook?

Friend or Foe?• Teaching on its own, never causes

learning.• Achievement is the result of the learner

successfully making sense of the teaching.

• The design of work for learning is more important that the sharing of knowledge out of textbook.

Definitions of “Cover”• To put all over the

surface of• To achieve in

distance traversed; pass or travel over

• to hide from view

• Teaching surface details, not depth

• Teaching by mentioning, not understanding

• Inhibiting the development of understanding

Big Idea: Uncover• Use textbook as a resource to

support Stage 1 of backward design (to identify desired results/establish goals)

• Use textbook to uncover and explore essential questions

The teacher’s crucial roleDesigning the right experiences for Designing the right experiences for studentsstudentsThe abstract nature of big ideas, the understandings have to be “earned” through carefully designed experiences that uncover the possible meanings of core content…Sharing one’s understandings and passions about how the world works is doomed to fail without the right experience.

•“do not give your pupil any verbal lessons; he ought to receive them only from experience” (P.92 Rousseaau,1979)

•Dewey’s experiment: • • the fact of the sphericity of the earth VS the students’ meaningful idea of the sphericity of the earth

The teacher’s crucial roleDesigning the right experiences for Designing the right experiences for studentsstudentsA concept becomes “real” instead of abstract only if it makes sense of(our)experience and knowledge or provides us with new intellectual powers that open up possibilities, therefore, uncoverage can be explained as bringing a concept to life through experiences.

So teaching for understanding always requires something before “ teaching”: thought-through and designed experiences, artfully facilitated, to raise all the right questions and make the ideas, knowledge, and skill seem real and worthwhile.

•For example: trip to Chinatown, Classroom/school Chinese New Year decorations, students and teachers bow to each others before the class get start, videos/internet/computer technology….

Uncoverage: Getting inside the subject’s processes and arguments

To truly understand a subject, requires uncovering the key problems, issues, questions, and arguments behind the knowledge claims. the best teacher-designers know precisely what their students will likely gloss over and misunderstand in the text. So they design lessons to deliberately and explicitly require their students to find issues, problems, gaps, perplexing questions, and inconsistencies that were hidden in earlier and present accounts.

Uncoverage strategy: Scour the text for statements that can be reframed as essential questions for investigation across many other key topics, across units and courses.

Textbook should work as a platform to jump off of and return to in the course of inquiry into important questions. And the teacher must supply the needed research materials and directions.

• Examples: the order of address parents and siblings in Chinese: baba mama (father, mother) √ mama baba

× gege jiejie (older brother, older brother) √ jiejie gege

× didi meimei(younger brother, younger sister) V meimei didi

×

Uncoverage: Getting inside the subject’s processes and arguments

Another key teacher role is “uncoverer” of student misunderstandings and persistent performance errors through artful experiences and discussions. Because the mistakes are not avoidable, or shameful, but key episodes in gaining understanding.

Getting beyond oversimplification:

• At the heart of uncoverage is the designed learning of how to question the material.

• The most important ideas and claims must be tested, not just mentioned, if they are to be understand

• Coverage exacerbates the forgetfulness, inertia, and misunderstanding we work to overcome

• Teaching must be simplified appropriately

How and when to teach

The Roles of Teacher

Relating type of teaching to type of content

Be aware of self-deception

• Think what is needed for learning VS comfortable for teaching

• What teaching approaches make the most sense given the learning goals, the assessments, and the experiences necessary to make the big ideas real

Timing is everything

• Do I know when to lecture and when not to?

• When to instruct and when to let learn?

• When to lead and when to follow?• Problem: too much direct

instruction, front-loaded

The secret of success in [teaching] is pace…Get your knowledge quickly and them use it. If you can use it you will retain it. -Alfred North Whitehead, The Aims of Education and Other Essays, 1929, p.36

The need for more formative assessment

• Purpose of formative assessment– To check comprehension in a timely manner– To provide feedback to enhance understanding

Assessment techniques

• Index card summaries/questions– E.g. have students write the structure they

learned at the end of the class and give an example

• Question Box or Board– E.g. have students write down any questions they

have– E.g. teacher prepares a box of review questions for

students to answer

• Oral questioning– E.g. can be used when going over an exercise– E.g. can be used for cultural discussion

• Oral presentation/peer-teaching– Have students present a language point they

prepared, give examples and check peers’ understanding

Understanding and the use of knowledge and skill

• Knowledge and skill is learned back and forth from content to application.– E.g. give examples first and have students

derive the grammatical rule, then have them make more sentences

Conclusion

• To teach for understanding requires artful design – Use different types of teaching– Timing: when to do what– Use of formative assessment