Priorities

I am currently attempting to tackle the idea of Backward Design as a way of lesson planning. The general idea is that you begin with the outcomes you want (what should the students learn) and then decide what they need to show you to prove they have actually learned what you wanted (essentially, assessment). Not until those things are nailed down do you ever actually come up with the lessons and activities. It is a new way of looking at education for me, and even though it is very different, I am starting to understand the true value.

As I am reading about this style of teaching and planning, the idea of true understanding has come into play. What does it really mean to understand something and how do we prove that in the real world. In the book I am reading, Understanding by Design by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe, I am beginning to understand how important it is to set your priorities as a teacher. We look at a school calendar and see all of these blank days to fill, but when compared to the actual amount of information to cover, there can never be enough time! Wiggins and McTighe remind us that "teachers can only help students learn a relatively small number of ideas, examples, facts, and skills in the entire field of study; so we need to help them transfer their inherently limited learning to many other settings, issues , and problems" (40). WOW! This is a huge task and really makes me rethink my ideas of learning and understanding. We want to be able to delve deep into ideas and then be able to apply those ideas to many different situations, not just cover as many ideas as time will allow. Think Depth not Width....a river perhaps.

Yes, it is important for my students to be able to label the parts of a life cycle, but it is even more important that they are able to take the whole idea of a life cycle and apply it to other concepts and ideas over time. Am I really teaching them the vocabulary and reading skills, or am I making sure they can take those skills along with them through life and apply them to the newspaper and a job application as well as their fourth grade textbooks.

I have always accepted that my chosen field of profession holds a great deal of responsibility...shaping the lives of children and the future as so many people have said in the past, but now I can really see that the actual information is not as important as each students ability to really understand and apply the learned information to as many different examples and situations as possible. I think that the authors of my textbook have done a great job of explaining how that is added to my list of responsibilities.