The concept of backwards planning is thrown around a lot in D.C. Public schools.  A version of Understanding By Design, adapted for D.C. Public schools, was the first book I was given at teacher orientation. The book said that backwards planning isn’t teaching to the test. Instead, it’s teaching to a series of tests–some formative and some summative, but the tests are really good–designed to measure rigorous goals–so it’s ok.

I know in a college course, this is a very different conversation.  Courses are more often structured around lectures and reading lists rather than student learning and experience, and district standards aren’t a factor.

I have to admit, before this week I hadn’t read the actual book by Wiggins and McTighe, but I cringe when I hear their names.  Too many professional development sessions designed to help me “align” my curriculum

I was surprised when I read UBD’s aspects of understanding that included empathy and self-knowledge.   The backwards design focus has teachers prioritize such big goals, (that are carefully worded but still subject to interpretation).  If we create courses for goals that include all of these dimensions, can we really reach them? Is a course supposed to do so much?  And especially in the case of young students, are the same goals appropriate for all students?

My teacher training consisted almost solely of two things: behavior management and backwards-designed long-term plans, units, and lessons. So much attention and priority is placed on what course goals are worthy (D.C. switched this year to the Common Core) and how we will assess those goals, and so little attention to how we actually teach these things.  Lee Fink says that teachers have two chief responsibilities: planning a course and interacting with students.  Because of some districts’ conceptions of backwards design, I think the quality of teacher-student interaction, learning activities, and the classroom experience as a whole has suffered.

“Understanding by Design” reiterated some of the theories and concepts that we have covered throughout the semester. I appreciated the examination of understanding and found my self in agreement with many of the concepts, but felt overwhelmed thinking of how to design curriculum that would meet all of the goals set forth in the text. I think that in order for students to truly understand something they have to go beyond just repeating facts and show how they can effectively apply the knowledge that they have acquired. Instructors then must design assignments that force them to think deeper about what they read and study in class. Wiggins and McTighe state “curriculum designed for understanding must…help students realize that their job is not merely to take in what is “covered” but to actively “uncover” what lies below the surface of the facts and to ponder their meaning” (103). This most assuredly should be the goal of any assignment that we include in course syllabi, but I think that this can be hard to tackle. We have discussed before how what we already know has a critical impact on what we can accurately learn in the future. As a teacher I feel that you have to continually reassess your own understanding of a subject manner, while also accurately assessing the knowledge level of the students you’re are teaching. If you are not aware of your own limitations and blind spots, then designing curriculum that can reach students and fully engage them can be a struggle.

I also appreciated that the authors’ discussed the importance of empathy. As I was reading chapter four of the text I found myself thinking back to some of the things that Wilner confronted in her classroom when she had her students read and respond to “Territory”. I think this is a good example of how a lack of empathy and a refusal to walk in someone else’s shoes can inhibit the learning process. Wilner describes her students as being hostile and prejudice toward the main character of the text, and gives examples of how her assignments eventually caused students to take a more thoughtful look at the text. I think that empathy is crucial to learning, and as we saw in Wilner’s example, indifference toward other people’s beliefs can completely prevent students from grasping the bigger themes in a text.  She was able to confront this issue head on by offering her students an option that she would not have normally made available. By allowing students to respond to the writing in the form of a letter rather than a formal essay her students got more out of the assignment. As teachers when we see that students are having difficulty embracing an assignment or reading, we sometimes must learn to reevaluate our traditional ways of evaluating them, and then design assignments that will force them to move beyond their limitations. I also thought it was relevant to discuss the difference between empathy and perspective as the authors do when they explain “ Empathy is warm; perspective is cool, analytic detachment” (98). As good critical readers we have to negotiate between both aspects of understanding. It is important that we not stand so far away from a text that understanding the positions of the different characters becomes impossible, yet we must also be willing to stand back far enough when necessary to critically asses the possible assumptions the author may be making, and what we can surmise from that.

This week’s readings brought back memories of my first year as a Reading Specialist at a middle school in Woodbridge, VA while I was completing my master’s project at Virginia Tech.  I met my new students (small group of 12 students sitting around a large oval table) with great excitement. I was ready to teach! I had my extensive and detailed lesson plans, activities, and selected texts ready to begin the semester. There was a small problem; I was ready to teach, but my students were not ready to learn.  No matter how hard I tried, they resisted by turning their backs to me and engaging in a conversation with each other. I went home that day sad until a great idea hit me. They were not having fun. I spent all night coming up with new activities that incorporated fun games to engage them in my lessons. I returned the next day to face even a greater opposition. This time I was crushed, because I had no more tricks up my sleeves. I found one of my students – let us call him Travis – sitting in my chair that had wheels. I asked him repeatedly to move out of my seat. He looked at me each time and turned his back to me. With each time I repeated myself, I became angrier and angrier. One of the other students stopped talking to Travis and asked me, “Why can’t Travis sit in your seat?” That was when I realized that there was a war between us and they were winning. I said, “You are absolutely correct. Travis has every right to sit in that comfortable chair.” I walked around the table and I sat in Travis’ uncomfortable chair. The room became extremely quiet. I had everyone’s attention as they stared at me. I pushed my lessons, activities, readings, and fun games away from me on the table. I said, “Okay, let us get to know each other!” For the rest of the class, we just talked. I became a part of the learning community. They took me in as they opened up about their lives, about their “hate” for reading, and about their distrust in authority.  I began to individually interview them, which served as part of my informal assessment. I unlocked the truth behind their defiance. My initial goal of developing strategic readers was side tracked. I had to go backwards in order to achieve my original goal. I had to reach them, their intrinsic motivation, before I could teach them.

Did I achieve my “enduring understanding”? I believe I did. Once I gained their trust by joining them in the community of learners, they were open to learning what I had to teach. By the end of the semester, they were all strategic readers. My “enduring understanding” was to help my students become life-long readers. To achieve that goal, they had to read strategically and critically for comprehension and engagement.  Without their consent to learn, I would not have been able to achieve the goal.

I couldn’t help but to think of the last two weeks of our course on Nat Turner when I read about the idea of uncoverage – “It’s depth over breath.” (Sample, page 2 of Teaching for Enduring Understanding) We dug down deep as we uncovered Nat Turner’s confession. Initially, I looked through the pictures in the Nat Turner and thought to myself, “This is easy!” Then, for the next two weeks, we used the five steps of Wiggins and McTighe to unearth, analyze, question, prove, and generalize Nat Turner. As Sample state, “It’s tempting to characterize uncoverage as ‘depth’ and coverage as ‘breadth’.” “…breadth is a key component of uncoverage, the weft to the warp of understanding. Breadth means connecting disparate ideas, finding new ways to represent what is uncovered, and extending one’s conceptual reach to the implication of the material. Taken together, depth and breadth mean moving away from the prepackaged observations and readily digestible interpretation that go hand-in-hand with coverage.” (Sample, page 1 and 2 of Teaching for Uncoverage rather than Coverage) We uncovered Nat Turner with depth and breadth!

I read with interest Prof. Sample’s blogs and the Wiggins/McTighe chapters. In my time as a marketing communications specialist, I became acquainted with the notion of backward design. Rather than writing to learn or as a means of discovery or creative development, or even just to impart facts (as with news, academic, fiction or non-fiction pieces), marketing communications pieces start with the customer in mind. Therefore, we communications types at IBM’s networking division asked our marketing folks: Who is the piece for? What kind of knowledge or lasting impression do we want the reader of the brochure, flier, article, etc. to come away with? What information or ideas are most important?  Armed with the answers to those questions, we would construct a piece combining text, diagrams (these were the early days of wide-area computer networking) and photos to impart the information in a very precise way.

The notion of backward design greatly facilitates the effort to maintain perspective and stay on track over the course of a semester. There is an old saying: “When you are up to your ass in alligators, it’s difficult to remember that your main objective was to drain the swamp.” To translate to an English classroom, often the teacher and students, as Prof. Sample notes, plow through the assigned reading list and serve the breadth, rather than uncovering meaningful aspects of what the reading can help them understand (the depth). Now, if the stated objective of the class is to get through the list and read as many stories as possible, this may be OK. But if the objective involves deeper considerations (as Prof Sample says, “revealing assumptions, facts, principles and experiences”), then we’ve got some swamp draining to do.

At the same time, I’ll note that the concentric circles (though technically not concentric; they’re really more like a set with subsets) represent an interesting and valuable concept as teachers seek to identify the best student learning results. I would hope (but am not sure) how much latitude or variance there would be among the enduring lessons or knowledge that each student might come away with.  How might a student’s background knowledge, culture or temperament affect the take-away?

Lindsey’s post gets at the problem of the skeptical student, an entity with which I never quite know what to do when I encounter it.  What I mean by the “skeptical student” is the student who is skeptical, not of a particular lesson or the course’s content, per se, but those students who seem skeptical, rather, about the whole learning thing.

On the one hand, I can rationalize myself into a state of not-caring: This student is a grown-up, not a minor child, and if he/she makes the choice for him/herself not to participate in what we’re doing in class, turn in the homework, etc., then fine, his/her loss.  As long as other students aren’t harmed by the skeptical student’s lumpishness in the back of the room, so be it.

On the other hand, sometimes that inner-city teacher movie with Hilary Swank will come on TV, and I’ll think maybe the line between teaching and mentoring should be blurrier than I’ve invited it to be.  Maybe I should worry more about helping my students to care about the content as much as I’m trying to teach them what the content is.

The truth is, I care an awful lot about my skeptical students, and they break my heart—but I really don’t know what to do with them!  And I especially don’t know what I’m going to do to get the value of taking a literature class across to them in a way that makes transparent application to the “real world” of whatever career they are going to go on to pursue (as our readings suggest is a worthwhile thing to do).

Simply put, I think readers of literature are better people because they have read literature.  I know the company line (as Alicia summarizes in her post) is to talk up all the great critical thinking and problem-solving skills that come out of the experience of having to read a text and then craft an essay about it.  But honestly, I think the true value of reading literature is how it invites me to experience parts of the world that I otherwise wouldn’t experience, how it challenges me to open my mind to new ideas, to consider perspectives and worldviews different from my own, to expose my heart to previously unfelt or unexplored emotions.  And, also, that it’s just beautiful, and to be appreciated for its aesthetics as much as for anything else.  That art for art’s sake is a valuable ideal…  What a cheeseball I must sound like to the skeptical student.

So I appreciated the inclusion, among the “six types of understanding,” of perspective, empathy, and self-knowledge alongside explain, interpret, and apply.  And the examples given—about the “rigid” girl who “just knows” she’s right; about the basketball coach screaming at his players—definitely corroborate with my gut instinct, which is that reading literature invites you to become a better person; it’s a form of character education, in a way.  But I’m still not sure I know how to get the skeptical student on board.  I find that skeptical students are not only reluctant to apply their minds in class, but they are also unlikely to apply their emotions and personal experiences.  I wish there were some sort of Hilary Swank-esque way I could raise the stakes for them, and I’m open to hearing any and all ideas others in this class might have about this.

One incredible success story I have heard, though, comes from my friends in the military, some of whom teach at a military academy.  This friend taught a junior seminar on poetry, and some of the students challenged the relevance of the course in the context of their military careers—they’d enrolled because they thought it would be an easy “freebie” that wouldn’t actually challenge them with any military rigor—and my friend was able to persuade these students that the study of poetry is just as important as the study of military tactics.  That military officers rely as much, if not more so, on their moral compasses as their navigational compasses, and that the study of ethics and human feeling provided by poetry is as relevant, if not more relevant, to success, humanity, and effectiveness in the on-the-spot decision-making the battlefield requires.

But I’m not a military instructor, and I’m not Hilary Swank.  Do I gotta getta gimmick?  Is it enough to teach to the students who care enough, or is there something I should be doing to try to reach the skeptical student, too?  And in trying to reach this skeptical student, how hard is trying hard enough?  I wish we talked about these more “squishy” aspects of teaching with a bit more frequency—unlike Blau and his perfect audience of engaged students, many of the students I see in GMU classrooms are just sort of along for the ride, and I feel like it’s my job to somehow get them behind the wheel.

Sample’s series of posts are timely for me: I feel connected to the example of designing a new Lit Course, not because I often have the feeling, but because I am now, for the first time, designing my 201 Lit Course at GMU.  I’ve been struggling with just the notion Sample points to: the question of developing a reading list based on what I think the kids should read, versus the idea of organizing the texts around the concepts I’d like the students to learn.

I do think this backwards scaffolding is a good idea: I do it in my comp classes and have found it a really successful way of not only organizing my course, but of explaining and demonstrating to students how these skills transcend the classroom. But my struggle with designing this 201 Literature Survey, is that I’ve only taken survey courses what work to cover, rather than uncover—courses that focus on the texts, rather than the concepts (this is true both at the undergrad, and at the graduate level).  So bear with me while I think aloud. I’m going to try and, right now, backwards scaffold  (using the concentric circle idea presented in Sample’s post, along with some implicit consideration of Fink’s ideas) my 201 course.

I’m going to start with the institutional expectations. Mason sets forth these guidelines:

“Literature courses must meet at least three of the five following outcomes.

1. Students will be able to read for comprehension, detail, and nuance.

2. Identify the specific literary qualities of language as employed in the texts they read.

3. Analyze the ways specific literary devices contribute to the meaning of a text.

4. Identify and evaluate the contribution of the social, political, historical, and cultural contexts in which a literary text is produced.

1. (<– can’t get rid of that) 5. Evaluate a critical argument in others’ writing as well as one’s own.”

So if I had to categorize these prescribed learning goals into the 3 concentric circles Wiggins and McTighe present (“worth being familiar with,” “important to know and do,” and “enduring understanding”), I’d put reading with comprehension, detail and nuance at the “enduring understanding” level, and I’d also group “ways literary devices contribute to the meaning of the text” in that category. In terms of “important to know and do,” I’d like to see them “identify and evaluate the contribution of the…contexts in which a literary text is produced.” Finally, in the “worth being familiar with” I’d put the “identify specific literary qualities of language…” piece. Still though, there are more things I’d like them to accomplish: I’d like them to get a taste of what contemporary, classic, and experimental fiction, nonfiction, and poetry look like. I’d like them to think about the medium of the novel, the short story, the poem, the essay, and how those things reach different parts of the human experience than other interesting mediums (movies, tv, stage drama, video games, visual art, etc).

I guess I’m kind of thinking aloud here—and I know quite a few of these goals can be folded together and accomplished as such. I do think, that in writing all of this down, I have a clearer idea of what I think is important in the study of literature.  But this exercise does little to help me refine my reading list. Any number of books could achieve these goals, depending on how I teach them, right? Isn’t this idea of backwards scaffolding more about the exercises we do in class than the texts I choose?

So back to the original plan? Find a set of texts that are contemporary/canonized/anti-canonical/interesting/that I like and go from there? I feel like I’m back at square one!

The readings on course design have been great for encouraging me to actually stop and take the time to consider — to question — the class prep process that for many instructors has become rote. I appreciate this aspect of the backward course design best of all, I think; it is one of the few strategies or approaches that we’ve discussed in this class that has as much (more?) value for the teacher as it does for the students. Teachers, often caught up in their own field of specialization, can benefit from the reminder that content teaching is only one small part of education. Prioritizing certain types of knowledge and skills allows teachers to keep their requirements reasonable and to focus on those that will most benefit learners.

Thinking back over the various readings and discussions that we’ve encountered in the course, however, I cannot help but recognize the constraints inherent in teaching. No matter how well you explain an idea or how rigorously you attend to the pacing and materials of a course, there will be students that don’t meet you halfway.

“You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink.”
Sometimes, it’s just that simple.

I can develop a rapport with my horse. I can tell him how refreshing it is to enjoy a nice cool drink. I can explain to him that we will be going on a little walk that will end up at a watering hole. I can guide him over the rocks and past the scrub-brush and point out the sparkling waters up ahead. I can find the point with the easiest access to water. I can even get down on the ground next to the watering hole and have a drink myself, just to show him how fine the water is. But damn it all: I can’t make him drink.

There is one thing that I think may encourage these little ponies, a consideration that is important in uniting course design with the day-to-day practice of classroom teaching: transparency. It is essential that students are able to orient themselves not only within a specific activity but also to understand the way in which that activity fits into the plan for the day, the day into the week, and the week into the course. Although this plays into Wiggins’ comments on the need for motivation that is intrinsic with students, it also allows those who do not have much personal interest in a topic or even in a whole course to track their own progress.

I like this multi-faceted definition of “knowledge.”

It is one thing to be able to parrot information received and regurgitate it onto a page. It’s another to be able to put it into your own words and apply it outside its original context.

I also like this discussion of what I’ve come to understand as “learning outcomes.”

It is one thing to, as Dr. Sample illustrated, fill a fifteen or sixteen week syllabus full of reading assignments that complete a semester. It is another to intelligently designate how those reading assignments contribute to a larger process—or, to steal from Wiggins and McTighe: have perspective.

I feel “having perspective” is a crucial element to course curriculum, at least in the Humanities, as one of the biggest contemporary issues facing us is that of perception. How does the ability to read a book translate as a useful tool in work force? I believe making our learning outcomes more explicit is one way, given that I believe that most of my coursework in English fruitfully invites the play of multi-faceted knowledge yet isn’t made so discreetly obvious the way the Pythagorean Theorem would be to a math student.

To steal Robb’s example (as I am a huge FMF fan), I can explain that The Good Soldier is a critical work that exemplifies the fragility of marriage in early twentieth-century Europe. I can interpret that, even with its title and publication proximity to World War I, the book is not about war but love—and having that love lost, not by war, but peace-time problems like mental illness and suicide. And I can apply that knowledge by comparing it to other canonical Modernist works (such as Mrs. Dalloway), illustrating its differences, as I did a couple years ago in my final year of my undergraduate program in a survey course on early twentieth-century Literature.

Yet to have perspective, to empathize—to have self-knowledge … these moments very rarely crop up in the classroom explicitly. They’re certainly intended to be learned a subconscious level (“textual power”). And I believe that a degree in English Literature, despite its lack of proximity to any real field of work but the academy, can be similarly applied to other doctrines/fields because of its practice in multi-faceted knowledge. But do we make that process explicit to our students? Do we even make it most explicit to ourselves? With designated learning outcomes we could at least get closer to addressing these two questions and answering them.

In regard to perspective and the larger picture, “So what?” is one of the most divisive remarks a professor can put on a student’s paper. Many students may find that kind of remark condescending. Others simply may not see the purpose behind it (something I spent a lot of time on as a campus writing tutor). Yet really, truly, all the professor is trying to get at is for the student to see the larger picture, to make certain the argument being made—and the thesis supporting it—is grounded in the perspective of legitimate “worthiness.”

Really, it’s hard to think that a classroom is ever NOT founded on learning outcomes, at least on a subconscious level. But by making them more explicit to ourselves, we may avoid confusion down the road in communication with our students and help overturn flawed “perspective” regarding the teaching of literature at the college level.

The facets of understanding from Understanding by Design are interesting in that they present a multi-faceted, well, understanding of the process of understanding something.  It is a refreshingly thorough analysis of what goes into actually understanding a concept, theory, work, or piece of media, particularly because it goes to great lengths to explain each facet and provide relevant examples of them.  It’s also a good replacement for what we might think of as the “traditional” method of understanding, which usually just consists of being able to recite facts and sometimes to demonstrate them via explanation, interpretation, and application.  Understanding is far more complex than recitation, and while it’s certainly an impressive (and sadly disappearing) feat to be able to recite, say, the poetry of Yeats from memory, that doesn’t delve into what really qualifies as understanding said poet’s work.

However, there seems to be something of an issue with the way understanding is presented in these facets, especially with their order.  It seems to me that the author isn’t presenting them in sequential order (i.e. that you must first be able to Explain before you can Interpret, and that you must first be able to Interpret before you can Apply, etc.), and while that makes sense for some of them (knowing one’s limitations and outlooks in Self-Knowledge could certainly come before or after the most basic Explanatory ability, but it also often isn’t even present in people who can Explain, Interpret, Apply, etc.), others seem to require each other in order to be possible.  For example, Explanation is the ability to go beyond knowing the basic plot of Catch 22 and being able to draw out the motivations of the characters, the imagery and the symbolism of Yossarian’s nakedness, the comparison between Milo’s capitalistic endeavors and the entire structure of the military.  How could one possibly have Interpretive understanding of the book without already having that Explanatory understanding?  Can anyone explain why aspects of the book matter if they cannot first explain why things happen in the book in the first place?  And how is it possible to Apply the “why does it matter” of the book to, say, the modern military industrial complex of the United States or to the changing (or unchanging) nature of war if one cannot Explain and Interpret Joseph Heller’s work first?

On the other hand, it’s pretty clear that many people could look at the book and identify their Self-Knowledge and the Perspectives present in the book and in the author’s writing of the book without Explanatory or Interpretive or Applicative understanding of it.  I don’t need to be able to Explain or Interpret a poem to have Self-Knowledge of the way I read poems, of what makes poems difficult or easy for me, of how I can best approach a poem on the first go-round; in fact, I think it is my lack of Explanatory and Interpretive understanding of poetry that makes my Self-Knowledge in regards to poetry that much easier to ascertain.  An experienced poetry critic might have a much tougher time talking about their limitations and approaches than I would, while I would have a much tougher time giving an account of the what, how, and why of any particular poem.

And what of Empathy?  That seems to vary wildly; sometimes I’m sure I could Empathize with an author or a character in some cases without any other kind of understanding, but in others, I think pretty much every other kind of understanding is a prerequisite for Empathy.  Or at least for Empathy that is backed up by anything.  And how does one Empathize with a physicist who discovers a particular theorem to describe gravitational forces in deep space?  Is Empathy even remotely relevant, even by the expanded definition that this author is using?  I don’t think so; I’m not sure I would ever expect or even care about someone’s Empathetic understanding of geometry, partly because I’m not even sure what that would look like, or why I should care about it.  In fact, isn’t Empathetic and Perspective understanding of scientific knowledge quite irrelevant?  What matters about relativity is whether or not it accurately describes the universe, not what Einstein’s social and political situation were, particularly because we can empirically demonstrate (or refute) the myriad parts of that theory using basic logical forms and operations we call “mathematics” which have absolutely nothing to do with sociopolitical circumstances.

On the other side of the coin, I’m not sure that specifically Applicative understanding of works of literature is always necessary or even possible; it’s pretty clear how we’re supposed to apply Fahrenheit 451 (i.e. censorship and the destruction of knowledge and creativity is bad, and you should prevent it), but how on Earth am I supposed to Apply In a Station of the Metro?

Finally, it seems to me that Perspective and Empathy could be easily and effectively covered by Explanation and Interpretation.  It could be argued that Perspective and Empathy are absolutely necessary for Interpretation to have any sort of impetus or merit; how can you Interpret a work if you do not first understand the Perspectives involved and Empathize with the author and the characters?  Couldn’t this all simply be reduced to Explanation, Interpretation, Application?  Self-Knowledge would be spread across all three of them, and Perspective and Empathy would be part of Interpretation.  That would also solve the problem of order.  Either that, or maybe understanding is even more complex (or simpler?) than this chapter would have us believe.

Even though I enjoyed the readings on course design (and am taking a course right now, on course design – using the Fink book), the chapter on Understanding (Ch 4) was what hooked me this week.  I teach first year freshmen and I suspect about half of them don’t understand what they read.  This is largely because they don’t take the time to read carefully.  But more interesting to me, is that I believe they don’t even know that they don’t understand.  They are unaware that they don’t understand.  And they are untroubled by their lack of understanding.

In class next week, I plan to begin using the six facets of understanding.   If a student can explain the text, interpret, apply, show perspective, empathize, and show a sense of awareness of their understanding (metacognition) then they can (likely) say they understand what they read.  These facets are a quantifiable way for students and teachers to gauge levels of understanding.  By applying this little rubric to everything they read, students will have some way to measure whether they truly understand what they’ve just read.

The frustrating part of designing courses, is that I expect my learning activities to jump from the reading that was done for homework.  I make every effort to plan with the learning goal in mind and tailor classroom work with certain assumptions (that the reading will be done).  But if there is a fundamental lack of understanding of the reading, then the classroom work is not engaging and becomes ineffective.  As we read earlier this semester, students expect that the lecture will include a summary of the reading homework therefore they just don’t do it or make little attempt to understand it.  Valuable classroom time is taken by the “re-cap” – which is also rather boring.

So the freshmen in my classes will receive a gift from me:  the gift of an “Understanding rubric”! This is the year they are creating the habits and patterns that will take them through the next few years.   When they come out of English 101 they will know how to understand if they understand (applicable for any subject), and they will know their strengths and weaknesses in reaching understanding.