[I’m re-reading Understanding by Design with a really slow, careful eye. I’m going to be writing about some of the ideas I find there. The book is really worth a read, as it’s a fantastic, very detailed way to build a progressive, performance-based curriculum. We use it as a fundamental building-block for curriculum design, and while I think we did a lot welll with it last year, but a major focus of mine for this year is to go much deeper in our usage of it. I’m going to picking and choosing pieces that strike me to write about. Often they won’t be the major ideas because I don’t think I can do that as well as they do in the book. I’m going to take a sideways glance at some of the other ideas.]

The fundamental idea at the heart of Understanding by Design is that we teach toward enduring understandings as our goal and therefore skills and content serve something deeper.

In the chapter “The Six Facets of Understanding,” Wiggins and McTigue write:

What any curriculum designed for understanding must do, then, is 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. This is, of course, what constructivism means: Meaning cannot be taught; it must be fashioned by the learner via artful design and effective coaching by the teacher.

First, I love that turn of phrase, that we must move from coverage to uncoverage — from recitation of facts to exploration of meaning. Secondly, I don’t think that means that we lose the lecture completely, but rather, with all things, we must now ask ourselves “What purpose does it serve for me to craft my unit / lesson / class this way?” For example, a brilliant lecture can lead to provocative conversation, writing, sharing. But there, even the lecture has been recast — it is not, at its most primary, a vehicle for information transmission, but rather a vehicle for questioning, probing, challenging. Think of the best workshops that various folks have written about this summer, the best ones did not merely transmit, they provoked, they began, for the participant, the process of “uncoverage.”

It strikes me that there are so many more skills that must come into play when we challenge our students to uncover rather than worrying about whether or not our teachers cover. Decoding skills, interpretation skills, the ability to form a thesis, the ability to judge the veracity of information, the ability to synthesize information into a well-argued position or thesis. This is what we want our students doing every day, but to do that means that we have to understand that — even with AYP and NCLB — our primary job is not to cover the material, but instead to use the material to uncover the intelligence, the abilities and passions and energies of our students.