Chapter 3: Gaining Clarity on Our Goals

The chapter describes and summarizes the terms “Established Goals, Understandings, Essential Questions, Knowledge, and Skills” (56). I too found the idea of deciding what is “worth an adult’s knowing, and whether having known it as a child makes a person a better adult,” to be particularly insightful.

Essential questions highlights the BIG IDEAS that are central to the design; ideas that the work will require students to address. By asking for "Essential Questions" designers are encouraged to avoid coverage and to commit to genuine inquiry — the discussion, reflection, problem solving, research, and debate that are the requisites for developing deep understanding of essential ideas.

Wiggins and McTighe go on to discuss the difference between “big ideas” and “basics.” Here I like the authors’ statement that “we need a ‘preponderance of evidence’ in order to ‘convict’ a student of meeting stated goals” (69). In other words, we must make sure students have mastered content standards through a wide variety of measurements before we can say they are definitely guilty of “understanding” content.

We have to help students to "learn how to learn" and "how to perform. Both have a vital mission when we teach. On the other hand, mastery of content is not the AIM of instruction, but a means. Understandings have to be inferred from well-designed and well-facilitated experiences, whereas a good deal of knowledge can be acquired from readings or lectures.

        Because BIG IDEAS are inherently transferable, they help to connect discrete topics and skills. Big ideas may be thought of as a linchpin (the device that keeps the wheel in place on the axle).

        The challenge is to identify a few BIG IDEAS and carefully design around them, resisting the temptation to teach everything of possible value for each topic.

         Some BIG IDEAS are:

                      Broad and abstract;

                      Represented by one or two words;

                      Universal in application;

                     Timeless;

                      Represented by different examples that share common attributes.

   

     What is big to the teacher or the expert in the field is often abstract, lifeless, confusing or irrelevant to the student. Indeed the challenge of teaching for understanding is largely the challenge of making the big ideas in the field become big in the mind of the learner.

         Authentic challenges involve realistic situations, where the context of the task is as faithful as possible to the real-world opportunities and difficulties. Transfer involves expertly addressing authentic challenges at core tasks, where the content is a means. Tasks can be ranked by the degree of independent reach by the learner in completing them: "far transfer", "near transfer", "Minimal transfer" and no transfer, but simple recall.

In terms of “finding big ideas,” the authors suggested two tips in particular that I think will be useful: “look carefully at state standards” and “circle key recurring nouns in standards documents to highlight big ideas and the recurring verbs to identify core tasks” (73-74). The authors remind us again that we are experts as teachers, and the “Expert Blind Spot” can prevent us from making big ideas obvious to students. We need to think like students in order to help them grasp big ideas and truly understand the content.