Teaching for Understanding

How do teachers recognize student understanding?

Individual students may create products to demonstrate their understanding:
Ideas for products or performance assessments include:
Journals, portfolios, exhibitions, demonstrations, oral presentations, video tapes, songs, slides, rubrics, essays, stories, arguments, costumes, visual works of art, charts, graphic organizers, graphs, tests, labs, Web sites, poems, maps, games.

Individual students show understanding when they:

  • Take active roles in evaluating their own progress toward goals
  • Apply knowledge to real world situations
  • Make connections across disciplines, from one reading/ lecture/ video to another, and from something learned in the classroom to their own experience
  • Independently solve problems
  • Transfer knowledge, or use it in a new situation

Groups of students show understanding when they:

  • Talk to each other meaningfully about the topic, even when the teacher is with another group
  • Rely on each other for knowledge
  • Trust student research
  • Provide thoughtful, relevant feedback
  • Ask for and provide clarification to each other, respect the ideas of each member of the group

When the Learning Experience has focused on deepening understanding and building knowledge and skills, classrooms often have these characteristics:

  • Desks and classroom arrangement are flexible and may change to suite the needs of a lesson
  • There is more student and teacher made materials on the walls than commercial
  • Essential questions, key vocabulary and important goals are visible, either posted directly or evident from student work

Teachers facilitate the deepening understanding when they:

  • Align assessments with goals/objectives and with learning activities
  • Provide activities which engage critical thinking skills and problem solving abilities while responding to an investigative question related to an understanding goal
  • Assess often and adjust instruction
  • Offer assignment choice based on student needs
  • Plan lessons so that there is time to confer and offer feedback with individuals and/or groups of students.
  • Plan lessons so that students receive feedback on their work from a variety of sources (peers, self, expert guests, and teachers)