Wiske, M.S. (ed) (1998) Teaching for Understanding. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. 379pp.

Blythe, T. & Associates (1998) The Teaching for Understanding Guide. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. 121pp.

These books are a result of a five-year collaboration between practising teachers and a team of researchers from Harvard University. My attention was caught when I read that two of the instigators of this Teaching for Understanding Project were Howard Gardner and David Perkins.

It is easy to be dazzled - and why not? - by the creative examples of how the participating teachers applied the underlying principles in their everyday practice, such as the following description of one teacher's introduction to the notion of taxonomy:

To probe the students' initial understanding of classification systems, she asked them to construct one. Almost everyone has a drawer full of junk at home - old pencils, can openers, nails, worn spoons. Her assignment for the students: survey the contents of a junk drawer and create a classification system for its contents.

How they did this made them more aware of classification as an enterprise, told the teacher what they understood so far, and allowed her to highlight some of the purposes and challenges of designing a classification system. (Perkins, in Wiske, 1998: 41)

In another example - a potential extension of the Night of the Notables component of George Betts's Autonomous Learner Model - Lois, a history and English teacher:

introduced the generative topic of biography by asking her class, 'What can biographies tell us about a period of history?' To capture students' interest and commitment to the endeavor, she asked them to choose a biography that reflected their own interests. Students' selections ranged from George Harrison to Benjamin Banneker. In discussions and brainstorming sessions that followed, Lois urged students to use instances from the specific lives they had read about to make informed guesses about the period in which the person lived.
...

As the discussions progressed, Lois helped students link the specifics about the persons they had studied to more general themes, leading them to speculate about how single lives reflected universals of human behavior, characteristics of one time and place, and unique personal traits. The discussion helped students recognize that individuals are not completely free agents but are affected by the assumptions of their cultures. (Wiske, 1998: 142)

However, the main significance of these remains that they bring to life the underlying principles of the Teaching for Understanding (TfU) framework. There are four of these - generative topics, understanding goals, performances of understanding, ongoing assessment - and a separate chapter is devoted to each in Blythe et al which, as its title hints, is the 'putting it into practice' one of these twin publications - whereas the much weightier (both literally and figuratively) book edited by Wiske provides the research and conceptual background to the project, though it too is liberally sprinkled with practical examples to illustrate these. For those who prefer their English plain, Wiske (1998: 61) restates the central ideas as four questions:

1. What topics are worth understanding?
2. What about these topics needs to be understood?
3. How can we foster understanding?
4. How can we tell what students understand?

   These four 'key ideas' are not so different from what many teachers will now regard as good practice, but the temptation for teachers to say 'We are already doing this' is best resisted, since the framework becomes increasingly more complex the more you look into its implications. That 'understanding goals' are not just rebadged behavioural objectives is emphasised throughout both books and underscored by the admission that 'all teachers in the project struggled with or resisted setting understanding goals.' (Ritchhart et al, in Wiske, 1998: 157) Essentially, the TfU framework is about promoting 'deep' rather than 'surface' learning in students, 'a tool for designing, conducting, and reflecting on classroom practices that nourish student understanding.' (Blythe et al, 1998: xii). The centrality of understanding is nicely summed up in the observation that:

   1. Basic skills are a means toward understanding and self-esteem is a result of understanding, rather than ends in themselves. (Wiske et al, in Wiske, 1998: 121)

   A subtle but important shift of emphasis is revealed in the Teaching for Understanding goal of 'uncovering a subject' rather than 'covering a subject' (Perrone, in Wiske, 1998: 23), while the need for learners to be able to transfer their knowledge is another central tenet:

   1. the view that what students learn needs to be internalized, able to be used in many different circumstances in and out of classrooms, serving as a base for ongoing and extended learning, always alive with possibilities .... (Perrone, in Wiske, 1998: 13)

   Hence, the 'performances of understanding' component which requires the learner 'to do something that puts the understanding to work - explaining, solving a problem, building an argument, constructing a product.' (Perkins, in Wiske, 1998: 41) Furthermore, curriculum differentiation via level of product is implied in Perkins's observation (in Wiske, 1998: 43) that 'what counts as a performance of understanding will vary with a person's sophistication.' Its form may vary according to what Gardner terms his multiple intelligences, too.

   This in turn links with the fourth plank of the framework, 'ongoing assessment'. Wiske (1998: 79) reports that:

   1. Teachers discovered that ongoing assessment was most useful when everyone in the class participated in the process. Students learned from analyzing the work of their peers. They saw multiple ways of approaching the assignment and came to understand the meaning of criteria as they used them to provide feedback to peers.

   Another key element of TfU is its recognition that choice of content is as important as the processes for dealing with it, content that is 'widely viewed as important and intellectually challenging.' (Perrone, in Wiske, 1998: 35) This is reinforced in a later discussion of possible criteria for good topics, namely:

   1. important to understanding in the field, related to the present, needed to get to a next level, naturally of interest to students, recurrent in the field, and can be engaged in by students at many different levels of complexity. (Perrone, in Wiske, 1998: 302)

   One of many virtues of the TfU framework is its ongoing professional development element, for 'learning to teach for understanding is itself a process of developing understanding' (Wiske, 1998: 83), whereby teachers are encouraged to think more deeply about their students' learning and its implications for their own teaching. That it may be worth the effort is suggested by one teacher's conclusion that 'the TfU approach markedly improved her capacity to engage reluctant students in understanding challenging curriculum.' (Wiske et al, in Wiske, 1998: 320)

   To buy these books will cost you about $45 for Blythe et al and $55 for Wiske. The Blythe book is probably sufficient as a starting point for schools and is less time-consuming to read. Inevitably there is some overlap in their content but the book edited by Wiske provides much more detail and does include practical examples not found in Blythe. I found it no burden to read both and I felt that I had a better understanding of the framework as a result. They seem relatively jargon free, but perhaps I have inhaled so much jargon over the years that I am now immune to it.

   These are not books about talent development per se, but the spirit and make-up of the Teaching for Understanding approach should steer teachers away from the worst excesses of the all-too-easy one-size-fits-all style of dealing with mixed ability classes (ie classes of more than one student!). To put it more positively, TfU offers teachers a set of guidelines for making life in schools more interesting and varied for all concerned. I certainly intend to try it in my own teaching in 1999.

   Stan Bailey
   UNE, Armidale  

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