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.

One of the first things to catch my attention was the difference between theory and interpretation.  Theories, which are general things, need to be true and there cannot be more than one theory about the same thing—one necessarily will need to disprove the other.  We are not nearly as interested in ‘theory’ in this way in the teaching of literature; instead, we are more interested in ‘interpretations.’ Interpretations are “contextual and specific” and also “are bound by the personal, social, cultural, and historical contexts in which they arise,” (91).  I’m reminded of our read-aloud activity where all three students had different ideas about the poem “Gretel in Darkness,” that amounted to three different, legitimate interpretations.

Another thing to catch my attention in the six facets of learning (which were all fascinating and I thought, succinctly defined), was application.  Application (Facet 3) deals with taking knowledge and applying it in a realistic context.  I think so often, we as teachers, especially working in a high-stakes testing environment of public secondary schools, don’t necessarily work to put knowledge to work in an entirely “real world problem” context.  And I think this can be the hard thing about making sure that learning is “engaging,” which comes up in chapter 9.  Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe highlight the need for the learning and accompanying work to be “purposeful from the student’s point of view in order to properly focus attention and provide direction” (199) and also the need for schools to move away from the “carrot” and “stick” system of extrinsic motivation and into a more intrinsically motivated classroom (202).   It’s so easy to fall back on the idea that “you need to know this in order to ‘pass the SOL’ or ‘do well on the AP exam’ or ‘get a good score on the SATs.’” And while this system of high-stakes standardized testing is not going away and cannot be ignored, neither is the best way for students to learn.  Unsurprisingly, the best way for students to learn is to make what they’re learning about interesting.

And now these two ideas– theory/interpretation and application of knowledge–collide.  Sometimes we treat testing and intrinsic motivations are ‘theories’ which cannot coexist together and therefore we must sacrifice the one (intrinsically motivating the students, because that’s the part we can control), because of the other. Or we say we’ll devote time to the ‘testing curriculum’ and cover that boring, dry stuff, and we’ll devote time to the ‘interesting curriculum’ and make that engaging.  But what if, as a practice, we saw the realities of 21^st century education and engaging students simply as different lenses that we might use to interpret our curriculum?  Regardless of how frustrating or annoying one interpretation might be, it’s still a valid one for secondary teachers.  Is this a challenge to me (and everyone else)? Is it possible to make what we see as SOL test prep into reading that is engaging, meaningful, and mysterious?

The concentric rings that work backward from a bull’s eye of goals for enduring understanding can also work as a pyramid.  From the top down, one must delineate overarching objectives that translate into well-defined goals and fan out into linked activities and criteria for measuring their success.  This is a useful intellectual construct and guide to action that applies to many endeavors.  Our U.S. embassies abroad in more than 160 countries undertake such an annual design process to ensure that their activities fulfill our national objectives.  Otherwise, these myriad efforts might be scattershot and we would risk misusing public resources, that is, your money.  Ditto for designing activities in a classroom, where teachers too are managers of resources, negotiators and shepherds of human potential.  

In every U.S. embassy, preparation of the Mission Performance Plan (MPP) is a major annual undertaking.  Consider Mexico City, where dozens of U.S. Government agencies operate under one roof.  Section chiefs come together to articulate Mission Objectives (the bull’s eye or the peak of the pyramid), which must be linked to strategic goals of the White House and State Department.  For example, one objective would probably be to strengthen U.S.-Mexican border security.  Among the goals that emanate from this bull’s eye might be an aim to reduce cocaine trafficking across the border.  “To Do” this goal will require training of an additional 300 Mexican border police and enhanced data sharing.  Activities and indicators of success will take into account the number of police who receive training in the U.S. and in Mexico, with an expectation of a 20% reduction in trans-border trafficking in 2014.  Responsibilities are assigned, with the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) taking the lead in coordination with the FBI, DHS and the consular section.

Without such a goal-centric plan, which flows from the abstract to the concrete, we lack intellectual coherence, focus and ballast.  We flounder and we may fail our customers, who are the American public or our students.  We miss the opportunity to pool our efforts and learn from others’ expertise and our interactive engagement.  Whether the design is a circle or a pyramid, it must have enough flexibility to incorporate variables that arise spontaneously, including in the give-and-take of a classroom.  I thus think of the Teacher as a Manager, a Diplomat, Designer and Coach who plans and orchestrates, starting with the bull’s eye, or the peak of that Aztec pyramid, and then never loses sight of it.                  

I found it a very useful exercise to examine the different ways of “understanding”, especially when considering the readings/discussions of different learning styles from earlier in the course. The two concepts seem to have a good deal of overlap to them; in other words, I would expect different types of understanding to come easier to different types of learners.
I know, for instance, that the ‘have perspective’ and ’empathy’ facets of understanding usually come pretty naturally to me. I am also keenly aware of my own limits, and able to work through why I am having trouble with a given “text”, and hopefully find ways around my limitations and obstacles. Explaining and applying are weaker areas for me; I know something, but am not always able to translate that understanding effectively to someone who lacks it. A bit of the Expert’s Dilemma, I suppose.
My real question here is: are we supposed to try and apply all these ways of understanding simultaneously? That seems cumbersome and ill-suited to most situations. I find it almost absurd to think I’m supposed to have empathy for a mathematical equation, for instance.
I doubt this was the authors’ intent, but they did not (in this chapter at least) say so explicitly. While it seems intuitively obvious that these different “understandings” are to applied appropriately, it would be nice to have that “from the horse’s mouth” as it were, just to assure that no confusion on the matter is possible.

Ah, back to pedagogy.  After poetry and comics it’s like having to get up and return to manual labor on an August hot summer day after a proper southern lunch.  But to get movin’:

Dr. Sample’s brief essays got me thinking back to my undergraduate education, and I think I can see which courses were made with learning goals and significant insights in mind (or something near to backwards design) and which weren’t.  One thing I’ll say is that I belive survey courses lend themselves to the learning-goal orientation of backward design more than Wiggins and Mctighe (I believe) give them credit for.  I know the suggestion wasn’t that survey courses are necessarily all breath and no depth, and I do agree that the survey course can lean toward that American jack-of-all-trades master-of-jack-shit phenomenon.  However,  it seems to me there is almost no way to take a course oriented around one (or a few) of these and not come away with a number of crucial or important insights.  A professor, with his expert knowledge, teaches certain books (the ones he loves the most, thinks the students would benefit from the most, or which will most readily offer his expert insight to the students) of a particular era, theme, concept, or society—and these, given their cohesion, are designed to transfer.   In a British literature course I took we delved first into thematic issues, and then into social movements, how to read literature, and the function of literature in society—all by going through a carefully selected, chorological reading list.  I couldn’t bring myself to read Mrs. Dalloway—I know, I know—but I remember The Good Soldier especially well.  Aside from a few insights that I took away—most of which I emulsified in my history studies at the time—The Good Soldier is what stayed with me.  If the course was especially focused on (rather than involving or conducive to) some greater insights that the instructor specifically designed, I wonder if I would have come away with that same love for The Good Soldier.  Would it have been grouped or subsumed into the larger concept—could something have been taken away from The Good Soldier?

Of course, it is totally possible that The Good Soldier would have had an even greater impact on me, have been an even more influential and insightful work otherwise.  I don’t mean to assume the role of pessimist so regularly, but isn’t being critical the mark of a good student?  Just two things: One, to me the “digging” focus of the backward design seems to smack of something like a post-New Critical New Criticism approach; an effort that, like New Critical teachers, has an agenda, a right and a wrong, but relies more on the teacher rather than the teaching.  Second, I take issue with that idea that backward design is moving away from the “prepackaged observations and readily digestible interpretations” of the traditional book-based method.  Of course, that would certainly be the case if the instructor was a New Critic, or something there-about, but it seems to me that if you arrange your course around what you want your students to learn then you have essentially oriented your course towards somewhat “automatic” and “prepackaged observations.”  How can students actually be “self-directed learners” if your determining the direction; aren’t they therefore teacher-directed learners under the guise of self-direction?  I wonder if the backward design, in identifying goals for a literature classroom, could potentially limit the scope of that classroom—foreclose, if you will, uncoverages that lie outside of those predetermined ones.  I suppose there is a danger behind literature being second to understanding.  I’ve returned to my eternal struggle with literature instruction: Will the literature still be enjoyable (will it be able to remain itself or will it be transformed into an academic-variant of itself)?

The irony to all this, however, is that my opinions/insights come directly out of the enduring knowledge I received from the better classes of my undergraduate education, all of which included, to be sure, a backward approach.  However, they were also based on wholly tentative syllabi.  I was taught that goal-orientation was problematic precisely because envisioning an outcome predetermines it in some way which will not allow for other outcomes to be as acceptable and, in doing so, undermines the natural value of whatever process is used to get there.  I guess the case I’d like to make is simply that a course design, in the best of all possible worlds (where the teacher has the desire, determination, and time to teach it as he/she sees fit), ought to have a purpose, direction—a goal, if you must—but not in such as a way as to limit the potential that is manifest in a literature classroom.  I wonder what a literature class that had only one required reading from the beginning would look like.  A class that has the first 2-4 weeks dedicated to one book and the next dedicated to a book that the teacher (and students?) will be selecting based on the previous readings?  Everyone has an Amazon prime account, don’t they?  In two days everyone could have the next book—easy as that.  I wonder how students would respond to that kind of class as well—would they be naturally more inclined to be involved?  It seems to me that they would be.  It also seems like it would be in keeping with some of the other concepts we’ve covered thus far.

I totally agree with Fink’s “forward-looking assessment questions” and it reminds me of what I imagine would have been the pedagogy of that history professor Dr. Sample mentioned in class a few weeks ago.  I also studied history as an undergrad and I think I did mainly story-telling for all my lower-level, non-primary-research (what a snobby student would not call “real” history) courses.  I would have liked that kind of assessment as a student; I don’t think students want to regurgitate, because there is no fun in it.  This, I think, goes back to Gee.  There’s never regurgitation in video games—there’s painful repetition (as in online Call of Duty or something)—but even then it’s a utilization of what you know to perform an act working towards victory.

Joy Wagener

In his post on ProfHacker, Prof. Sample wrote, “The idea behind backward design is simple, yet it’s something I find myself relearning again and again. Even now, as I prep for the upcoming semester, I am tempted to focus on what I want my students to read, rather than what I want my students to understand. It’s a testament to my perennial rediscovery of backward design that I wrote virtually the same sentence as above in my earlier post on backward design—and had forgotten I had done so. I trust (hope?) that I am not the only one who needs gentle reminders about the value of designing curriculum around understanding.”

I concur!  My school district uses Understand by Design (UbD, we call it) and every new employee sits through a week-long orientation on the “system.” Each employee is asked (forced?) to write unit plans for the entire school year using the UbD format.  This is all done at the start of the school year which, frankly, takes away the excitement of it all.  It’s a chore that is often done in a lazy-way in order to move on from it.

Consider that task.  As Sample suggested above, could you write out a UbD for every unit you’ll teach this year?  What if it’s a brand new course? What if you’ve never taught it before? What is your plan needs to change mid-year? I find the concept of UbD’s very exciting and a wonderful prospect.  It’s awesome to be able to teach everything in a way that leads up to the goals / what knowledge and understanding you really want your students to know; however, again and again I find myself straying from the master plan because it is difficult to plan ahead, it feels like a chore, or I stumble upon something else great in my planning process later in the year.

One big reason I stray from the UbD plan is because I find that working towards one major performance goal often neglects other important aspects of the text I might be teaching (I have trouble prioritizing). It’s almost as if I need several UbD’s for each novel or unit. Secondly (and as Wiggins and McTighe mentioned), it is very difficult to give your students the experiences they need in order to meet some of the six facets of understanding, namely empathy, self-knowledge, and application.  So, it’s worth prioritizing what needs to be taught.  And just like Prof. Sample, I need to prioritize my learning goals and, do as Wiggins and Tighe suggest:

1. “To what extent does the idea, topic, or process represent a ‘big idea’ having enduring value beyond the classroom?”
2. “To what extent does the idea, topic, or process reside at the heart of the discipline?”
3. “To what extent does the idea, topic, or process require uncoverage?”
4. “To what extent does the idea, topic, or process offer potential for engaging students?”