Teaching for Understanding: Questions to Ask Yourself and Your Students

Teaching for Understanding
Questions to ask Yourself and Your Students
by Chris Unger

Seven years ago, Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education set out to answer three questions:

What does it mean to understand?

How do we teach for understanding?

How do we assess understanding?

We sought these answers because research showed that students were not understanding what they were "learning." Sometimes students remembered a lot of facts or algorithms, but they could not think and act critically and creatively in a discipline. Why? And what could teachers do about-students' inability?
With the help of more than fifty teachers in the Boston area, and now hundreds of teachers from Seattle to Boston to Bogota, we found out what teachers could do to develop students' ability to understand deeply:

Design your curriculum around generative topics, topics that have great connections to students' interests and experience, and that are central to the discipline.
Clearly articulate and share with your students your goals of understanding, what you most want your students to understand from their experience with you.
Engage your students in performances of understanding, performances that cause students to do a great deal of thinking when using, applying, and enriching what they know in challenging, disciplinary work.
Practice ongoing assessment, learning-centered assessment throughout instruction that actively involves you and your students in constant reflection about what is being learned, how it is being learned, and why it is being learned.

Simple? Our experience in working with hundreds of teachers over time answers "No." In short, the teaching-for-understanding framework is a mirror to look at and reflect on one's own practice. At the heart of it is one question that is not a simple one: Is my curriculum, instruction, and assessment designed and practiced in a way that truly results in student understanding? From that one question, others follow:

Am I engaging my students in performances that help them to truly build their own understanding?

Am I sure about the few things I really want my students to understand?

Have I clearly shared those goals with my students, so that they can actively participate in achieving them?

Am I engaging them in inquiry about a topic that they truly care about, that I care about, and that ultimately is at the heart of the discipline I teach?

Am I practicing learning-centered assessment, involving my students in their own assessments based on criteria that are clearly articulated?

The teaching-for-understanding framework recommends you ask yourself these questions. It will help you answer them for yourself and discuss your answers with friends. We know it is difficult to find the time and administrative support to spend time assessing your teaching in this way. But when teachers are given the opportunity to ask and reflect on these questions, they feel that their teaching is more deliberate, focused, and reflective. Rather than feeling that they are attempting to cover a hundred things, they feel that they are teaching what is most important. Rather than handing knowledge down, teachers are helping students build up their own understanding. The result: Students understand. They are able to go beyond accumulating knowledge to applying it in novel and meaningful contexts.
We have found it useful for teachers to develop and post questions that make clear to students what they are learning and why. We call these questions throughlines. They tend simply to be great questions that often are at the heart of disciplinary inquiry and beg for an ever more articulate and deep response.
How can you use these throughlines?
If you can identify the four to eight central questions that you feel would ultimately benefit your students in their learning -- engaging them, engaging you, and proving immensely generative in their presence-then you can use those central questions to guide or map the journey of your teaching and their learning throughout the year. The point is not to arrive quickly at one, single answer, but to develop richer and more sophisticated answers over time through several experiences of learning and reflection.

Throughlines for the Year
One of the things that grew out of work with teachers was the notion of throughlines, or "central questions of inquiry."
Lois Hetland, a teacher we have worked with over the past four years and who is now one of our colleagues, originally created a set of twelve questions. At the beginning of the year, she told her class, "These are the answers I want you to get smarter about." And over the course of the year, they did.
They wrote about them at the beginning, middle, and end of the year, Her students referred to them again and again in the middle of their work. They used them as their touchstones of inquiry, relating all of their activities and reflections to them again and again. The questions became the students' questions. Her students used them all year long in a variety of contexts and activities.
The result was enormous success. Students became immensely articulate in their answers.
Since then, we have worked with hundreds of teachers to develop their own throughlines for their classes for the year. The great thing about questions is, they beg for answers. They can also guide your inquiries.
Throughlines for the year, and more specific questions for a unit or project, can do a great deal to focus you and your students' work.

About the Author
Chris Unger was the Professional Development Director at Project Zero, Harvard Graduate School of Education. He now resides in Seattle, Washington, where he works for the Seattle School District.
Project Zero

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