I. Three Conditions for Positive Change:

• Apply the principles of "Teaching for Understanding" to the implementation of technology;

 
• Accommodate the "scholarship of teaching and learning" as a way building and sharing knowledge about teaching for understanding in new learning environments;

 
• Develop robust programs for faculty development based on what we know about how people learn best.

 

"So, what is understanding?...In a phrase, understanding is the ability to think and act flexibly with what one knows. To put it another way, an understanding of a topic is a "flexible performance capability" with emphasis on the flexibility. In keeping with this, learning for understanding is like learning a flexible performance--more like learning to improvise jazz or hold a good conversation or rock climb than learning the muliplication table or the dates of the presidents...Learning facts can be a crucial backdrop to learning for understanding, but learning facts is not learning for understanding." (David Perkins in Teaching for Understanding).

In the book,  Teaching for Understanding Martha Stone Wiske explains that in teaching for understanding, teachers need to ask themselves four questions:
 

• What topics are worth understanding? (‘generative topics')

 
• What about these topics needs to be understood? ('understanding goals')

 
• How can we foster understanding? (performances in authentic, situated contexts)

 
• How can we tell what students understand? (ongoing assessment)

III. Teaching for Understanding: What inhibits it?
 

a. Teaching vs. Learning; Expert vs. Novice

"Teaching, by nature, is an egocentric profession in the sense Piaget used the term: we find it difficult to see when our teaching isn't clear or adequate. We don't easily imagine how what is so obvious and important to us cannot be equally so to novices. Combined with our desire to cause learning and to find any evidence of success, we are prone to unending self-deception. How easily we hear what we want and need to hear in a student answer or question; how quickly we assume that if a few intelligent comments are made, all students get the point. This is the tragic flaw inherent in trying hard, and for the right reasons, to get people to understand and value what we understand and value. It then often doesn't occur to us that students are trying equally hard to appear knowledgeable." (Grant Wiggins, "Embracing Accountability").

b. Coverage

-The Clinical Term
-American Literary Traditions

c. Coverage vs. "Uncoverage" (Grant Wiggins)

"A curriculum designed to develop understanding would uncover complex, abstract, and counterintuitive ideas by involving students in active questioning, practice trying out ideas, and rethinking what they thought they knew. 'Uncoverage' describes the design philosophy of guided inquiry into abstract ideas, to make those ideas more accessible, connected, meaningful, and useful. Uncoverage, then, must be done by design." (Understanding by Design, p. 21).

d. Prior Understanding  and Misunderstanding

• A "Benchmark Reflection" I've been using on sample cultural artifacts on the opening day of the semester.

 

 

1. What do you see here? Describe the document/artifact in terms of content, without being interpretive.

 2. What do you think you know about this document based on reading it and any previous knowledge?

 3. What do you think the document reveals about its era/ What kinds of information can be learned from the document? (There might be more than one kind of information).

 4. What don't you know about the document? What questions you ask about it?

 5. If you were going to do further research on this document on World Wide Web or in the library, how would you go about it?

 6. What knowledge or skills are you bringing to this course from learning experiences you've had that help you make sense  these documents?

IV. Connecting Teaching for Understanding to New Media Technologies

a. Public performances of understanding

-American Literary Traditions

 b. Authentic and situated learning

-"Soul Murder" Workshop
-American Studies at UVA (AS@UVA)

c. Mobility among levels of knowledge

-Bloom's Taxonomy (Portland State U; Nancy Perrin and John Rueter)
  -Shifting the focus of classroom time with the taxonomy in mind
  -Connecting the levels with multiple media and strategies
  -Assessing the levels, from both teacher and learner perspectives

-Graph Theory Tutorials and Glossary (Caldwell)

-"Women in the American Experience" (McClymer)
 

d. Constructivist Learning Environments

"Seven Goals for the Design of Constructivist Learning Environments": (Peter C. Honebein in Wilson, Constructivist Learning Environments).

 1. Provide experience with the knowledge construction process.

 2. Provide experience in and appreciation for multiple perspectives.

 3. Embed learning in realistic and relevant contexts.

 4. Encourage ownership and voice in the learning process.

 5. Embed learning in social experience.

 6. Encourage the use of multiple modes of representation.

 7. Encourage self-awareness of the knowledge construction process.

Examples:

-National Museum of American Art CD-ROM

-Interquest: philsophy distance learning course (Jon Dorbolo)

-19th C American Literature--Blackboard's CourseInfo (Bass); password protected.
 

V. The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

a. Lee Shulman, teaching like scholarship has:

• Vision
• Design
• Interactions
• Outcomes
• Analysis

...for something to be an act of scholarship it has to be:

• public
• susceptible to critical review and evaluation
• available for exchange and use

 

b. Online examples of a scholarship of teaching:

• Course Portfolio on American Literary Traditions (Bass)

 
• Chemical Sciences at the Interface of Education (Coppola)

 
• Math8 at Brown University (Banchoff)

VI. Faculty Development Programs on the Principles of Good Learning

When a campus looks at its faculty development program for helping faculty make the most sensitive and meaningful integration of new technologies into teaching and learning, can it be said that its program is consonant with what we know about how people learn best:

-collaborative?
-sustained?
-incremental, recursive, iterative?
-allows learners to be reflective about their learning?
-environment safe to take creative risks?
-situational and grounded in the culture of reward and work, not marginal to it?
 

Some Print and Electronic Sources on Teaching for Understanding, Scholarship of Teaching, and New Media Technologies.

American Studies Crossroads Project. American Studies Association and Georgetown University.

Bass, Randy. "The Scholarship of Teaching: What's the Problem?" Inventio (Winter 1999).

---. Course Portfolio on American Literary Traditions. Georgetown University. http://www.georgetown.edu/bassr/portfolio/amlit/.

Brunsford, John D., Ann L. Brown, and Rodney R. Cocking, eds. 1999. How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.

Kafai, Yasmin and Mitchel Resnick. 1996. Constructionism in Practice: Designing, Thinking, and Learning in a Digital World. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers.

Perkins, David N., Judah L. Schwartz, Mary Maxwell West, and Martha Stone Wiske, eds. 1995. Software Goes to School: Teaching for Understanding with New Technologies. Oxford: Oxford University Press 1995.

Wiggins, Grant and Jay McTighe. Understanding by Design. 1998. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

Wilson, Brent G., ed. 1998. Constructivist Learning Environments: Case Studies in Instructional Design. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Educational Technology Publications.

Wiske, Martha Stone, ed. 1998. Teaching for Understanding: Linking Research with Practice. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Some sites cited:

InterQuest Online courses (Philosophy and others)
http://www.orst.edu/instruct/phl201/

Inventio (Online journal about teaching and learning; George Mason University)
http://www.doiiit.gmu.edu/inventio/index.html

National Museum of American Art cd-rom. Smithsonian National Museum of American Art.

Perrin, Nancy, and John Rueter, Curriculum Revision with Educational Technology: Improving Student Outcomes in Large Courses. (FIPSE funded project; Portland State University).
http://edtech.clas.pdx.edu/

"Soul Murder" Workshop, John McClymer (Assumption College).
http://www.assumption.edu/HTML/Academic/history/WWHP/Workshop.html

Technology and the Classroom: A Bibliography (Kathy Koberstein)
http://madison.wlu.edu/~kobersteink/class.htm

"Women and the American Experience Syllabus," John McClymer (Assumption College).
http://www.assumption.edu/HTML/Academic/history/Hi113net/Hi113Syllabus.html

World Lecture Hall (University of Texas).
http://www.utexas.edu/world/lecture/

____________

Randy Bass:

bassr@gusun.georgetown.edu
http://www.georgetown.edu/bassr/