A Teaching for Understanding Graphic Organiser (TfUGO) of TL6003

Generative Topic: The Tipping Point: Turning Teaching into Learning

Long-Term Goals/ Throughlines: These are the key questions that staff that teach

are invited to engage with throughout the programme:

● What is good teaching and how does it relate to learning? (How can I turn

teaching into learning? How can I research my teaching? How will I know

what my students know and understand? How will I gather evidence of their

learning?).

● Why MI? (If students have multiple intelligences and learn in different ways,

what are the implications for how I teach and how I assess?).

● How can I teach for understanding? (How can I uncover, rather than cover,

the course so that students discover and learn while teacher goes ‘under

cover’?).

● How can I communicate with and engage students? (How should I role

model what it is like to think in this discipline? How can I capture its magic

and make it contagious? How can I use variety of method and on-going

assessment to engage students and be the guide on the side?).

● How can I document, research, reflect on and communicate my teaching and student learning and build on the practice of others?

Short Term/Modular Goals (UGs): By the end of this module students should

understand that:

1. Teaching is related to Learning

2. Students learn in different ways which invites more flexible teaching methods

3. Good teaching is focused on what the students will do to gain understanding

4. Assessment for understanding is about providing authentic and flexible

learning opportunities for students and a variety of on-going feedback paths

5. Teaching is an intellectual, reflective, critical, communal act of scholarship

UG Stage Performance On-going Assessment

1,5 Introductory Performances

Theme 1: Teaching

Places, Learning

Spaces

(Weeks 1, 2)

Theme 2: Learning

how to learn-

implications for

how we teach

(Weeks 3-4)

Students explore their

teaching/learning contexts.

Activities 1 & 2 (Weeks 1-2)

Teaching Places

Learning Spaces

Students revisit their own

learning process and

teaching beliefs

(Begin Assignment 1).

Students have on-going

discussion/collaboration

online and engage with and

respond to other participants.

Students participate in TfU

exercise re how they came to

understand a topic at which

they are expert, focusing on

their own learning process.

Discussion 3: How do I come

to understand?

(Complete Assignment 1).

Criteria: Identify T and L signs

(e.g. motto, logo, icons) in their

own settings and document, describe, share, critique and problematise these online.

Criteria: Describe, document, discuss, and critique classroom space.

Students to reflect on their own

journey as learners and

identify and analyse the

teaching characteristics of

good/bad teachers.

Feedback: Student: formative,

informal, self and peer to peer;

formal re Assignment 1

Teacher: formative, informal,

dialogical and diagnostic;

formal re Assignment 1.

Criteria: Identify their different

ways of learning; analyse how

they learned; reflect on how

they were assessed in the real

world; compare, contrast and critique models of teaching

and learning in the light of this

exercise.

Feedback: student and teacher

– as above.

# LOs: 1,2, 4, 5,6

2,3

4

Guided Inquiry Performances

Theme 3: Different

Folks- Different

Strokes

(Weeks 5-7)

Theme 4: Assidere:

Sitting beside the

Student

(Weeks 8-9)

(1) Students profile their own

learning strengths/MI.

Discussion 4: My MI

(2) Students explore and

reflect on a series of entry

points to learning in a

collaborative exercise in a

real/virtual art gallery.

Discussion 5

Entry Points to Learning

Students to explore

classroom assessment

techniques (CATS) and

investigate their own

students’ learning

(Complete Assignment 2).Discussion 6: Asssidere: The

CAT Scan

Criteria: (1) Students to

identify their own profile of

intelligences and reflect on

emergent T and L issues.

2) Students to communicate and collaborate in small

groups to read, analyse and interpret an artwork using a

variety of entry points.

Feedback: (1) & (2) Students:

informal, self and peer-to-peer.

Teacher: informal/dialogical.

Students to conduct classroom research and

analyse and interpret the

emergent data.

Feedback: Students: peer to

peer, informal; formal, self -

assessment re CAT exercise;

Teacher: informal; dialogical;

Teacher: formal re CAT.

#LOs: 1,2,3,5,6, 7, 8

1,2,

3,

Culminatory Performances

Theme 5:

Reflection-

Bringing it all back

Home: The Case

for the Reflective

Students engage in

reflective / metacognitive

exercises, using the arts as a

catalyst to understand

reflection.

Students respond to key

SoTL readings and relate

Criteria: Students to reflect on and critique their

preconceptions, based on

given artistic stimuli, teaching

experience and SoTL readings.

Students to appreciate and commit to a reflective,

professional stance re the

4,5

Practitioner

(Weeks 10-12)

theory to their own practice.

(Complete Assignment 3).

Students to share their

learning with colleagues in a

final reflection (Discussion

Forum 7) capturing

/evaluating their learning

across three portfolio

entries/assignments and

through earlier discussions.

integration of R, T and L.

Feedback: Students: informal,

dialogical, including self and

peer. Teacher: informal,

dialogical, peer to peer.

Criteria: Students to analyse and synthesise key readings

and evaluate and relate these

to their own questions and

contexts.

Feedback: Student: self-

assessment; formal,

Assignment 3;

Teacher: Formal, Assignment

3.

# LOs: 1, 4, 5, 6, and 7,8.

● Skill Strands: Research (Major focus); Reflection (Supported); Discussion

(Required).

● UGs = Understanding Goals Crosscheck: Long term /Throughline Goals:

embedded in discussions and assignments; Short term/Modular Goals are

itemised 1-5 (above) and are in phases of inquiry.

● Learning Outcomes Crosscheck: 1-8 embedded in assessment design and

criteria.

Extract from online handbook:

Section 4 Assidere: Sitting Beside the Student

4.1 Section IntroductionThe important aspect of this theme is that it provides the opportunity for

participants to unpack the idea of assessment as feedback, rather than as

judgement. The root of the word assessment comes from the Latin – assidere

which means to ‘sit beside’ the student. The focus is not only on sitting an

exam- which is just one form of summative, terminal assessment! We tend to

think of assessment in terms of an appendix to learning, rather than as

intrinsic to it. The TfU model sees assessment as on-going, as a continuing

process of feedback where the teacher has several opportunities to ‘sit

beside’ the student. We will also explore the idea of assessment for learning

(formative and diagnostic assessment, usually criterion referenced), rather

than of learning (summative assessment, for judgement and marks – usually

norm referenced) and consider that the teacher is not the only expert or

assessor in the room: there is also room for self-assessment and peer

assessment. Students learn much from each other (peer assessment) and

from standing back and reviewing their progress (self- assessment) much as

you have been doing in assessing your own assignments before submission.

1.2 Theoretical Note – TfU Framework – Revision of the Four Key Elements.

This Section 4 on Assessment focuses in particular on the third and fourth elements of the framework: Performances of Understanding and their On-going Assessment. This theoretical note provides a little more detail on

the framework than appears in Section 2 – when you were first introduced to

the theory.

The four key elements of the TfU pedagogic framework

The Teaching for Understanding Framework poses four questions which are

designed to elicit understanding: (Wiske, 1998). These interacting elements

guide educators’ thinking about fundamental questions that any educator has

to consider, but TfU reminds us that the focus in teachers’ planning should be

on developing student understanding: Each of the four elements is defined by

specific criteria that remind educators how to help students develop “genuine,

deep, flexible understanding of important subject matter” (Hetland, 2005: 1).

The four generic questions defining the framework are as follows:

1. What topics are worth understanding?

2. What must students understand about these topics?

3. How can we foster understanding?

4. How can we tell what students understand and help them develop

deeper understanding?

1. What topics are worth Understanding? (Generative Topics)

In short, what is to be taught? Such topics are called Generative Topics and

are used to generate knowledge about the course or module. Topics might be

conceived in terms of ideas, themes, issues, concepts, theories or questions

that “provide enough depth and variety of perspective to help students

develop significant understandings” (Perrone, 2000: 107). Since not all topics

lend themselves equally to understanding, some connecting more easily to

familiar contexts and subject matter than others, (Blythe, 1998: 18), some

questions being richer in potential than others, the research project devised

some criteria to help teachers recognise potentially generative topics: These

suggest that such topics should be (i) central to the discipline, (ii) interesting to

students and teachers, (iii) accessible to students through a variety of

resources and entry points and (iv) provide opportunities for multiple

connections with other topics on the course (Veenema, Hetland and Chalfen,

1997: 20 -21). Perrone (2000: 107) summarises the concept as follows: “the

most generative topics are central to a field of inquiry, accessible to students

at many different levels and rich in implications and connections”. In order for

student teachers to understand generativity, Perrone’s (2000: 107-108)

suggestion is to ask them to consider what practising disciplinarians would

envisage the big ideas of their fields to be:

“When pushed, students preparing for teaching, as well as practicing teachers, can imagine a small number of central ideas or topics around which their teaching could be organized- for example, at the secondary level, evolution in biology, the civil rights movement in American history and relationships in mathematics” (Perrone, 2000: 107).

He encourages them to consider accessibility in terms of its richness, of the

many levels at which it can be entered, and hence, the variety of entry points

that can unlock the door to understanding. Perrone glosses the word

“accessible” in an interesting way, commenting that the student with little

knowledge can enter and have a “powerful learning experience”; equally, the

experienced student has a place to enter and can also experience powerful

learning. Hence, he concludes that generative topics are “bottomless: There

is never likely a point within them when there is nothing more to learn”

(Perrone, 2000: 107). Perrone’s final suggestion is that student teachers ‘test’

their teaching topics beyond the above criteria by literally mapping them: “the

larger the map, the greater the possibilities, the more possible entry points

there are for students , the richer and more generative the topic is” (2000:

107).

In summation, a focus on Generative Topics is one way of ensuring that

teachers teach for understanding and not for coverage. Identifying such a

topic encourages teachers at all levels to be selective and to justify the

centrality and necessity of the topic. The idea of generativity challenges us to

make our teaching compelling and relevant to our students’ lives and learning

experiences. It begets the passion and motivation much prized in Boyer’s

(1990) concept of the scholarship of discovery. If students are to become

scholars in their own right, it is important to place them, whether at second on

third level, at the centre of the discipline, making connections with the key

issues of the day and the compelling, ‘big’ questions of the discipline. The

Deweyan influence on the generative topic is clear in the idea of

organisational themes and the ‘big ideas’ of the discipline; equally, Bruner’s

spiral curriculum surfaces in the richness of topics that can be explored

authentically at any level. Wiske (1998: 64) stresses that such topics need to

reflect the “concerns and experiences that occupy students in their regular

lives”. She (ibid) also reiterates Perrone’s point that to make these

connections between school work and the real world “teachers must be

primary decision makers about curriculum”, shaping and selecting it.

Ultimately, for this researcher, generative topics are a way of getting the

balance right between the student and the curriculum, course breadth and

disciplinary depth, teacher input and student performance.

2. What about these topics must students understand? (Understanding

Goals)

The problem with generative topics is that they can be too generative: where

does one stop? What is compelling in developing students’ understanding

and what can be left until another day? Whereas generative topics consider

subject matter, goals define more specifically “the ideas, processes,

relationships or questions that students will understand better through their

inquiry” (Wiske, 1998: 66). The answer to the above questions is expressed

in the Overarching Goals (long term goals), also known as Throughlines, and in the Unit-long Understanding Goals (short term goals) for the course

in question. These take the form of questions or statements that express

what is most important for students to understand. Central to such questions

is the idea of planning and focus and of making these goals public and

accessible to students. At university level, it implies that teachers must be

transparent and accountable to students and that the course direction is not

some mystery, shrouded in academic jargon, nor some labyrinth that keeps

changing direction. In terms of the Bologna agreement, already mentioned,

the call to name our goals, so that students can identify and meet them, aligns

well with the concept of TfU; for understanding goals point to what we want

students to understand and be able to do by the end of the module. As

suggested earlier, the advantage of grounding Learning Outcomes in a TfU

approach is that the lecturer focuses on the ‘doing’ of understanding and

performance, rather than that of activity per se. TfU challenges us to help

students apply knowledge appropriately in new situations, hence there is little

room for narrow outcomes.

The construct of the throughlines, the over-arching goals, returns to the arts

base of Project Zero thinking. The idea of a throughline emerged firstly in

the work of the Russian actor and theatre director Constantine Stanislavski

(1863-1938) as his way of keeping his actors focused during performance:

His definition relates to the logical sequence of all the actions in the play that

give coherence to the performance. Interestingly, in terms of the performance

view, a new translation by Jean Benedetti (2008: 312) names the term as the

throughaction:

If there is no throughaction, all the bits and tasks of the play, all the given

circumstances, communication, adaptations, moments of truth and belief, etc,

would vegetate separately from one another, with no hope of coming alive.

But the throughaction brings everything together, strings all the elements

together, like a thread through unconnected beads and points them towards

the common supertask.

Such metaphors are powerful when translated to the planning and teaching of

curricula in the classroom or the lecture theatre, putting the ‘the big picture’

and central questions up front; the throughaction as ‘thread’ captures the

coherent view needed by the teacher to connect the part to the whole and

support the student in finding that golden thread. It also underscores the idea

of TfU as an action theory, already discussed.

Veenema et al (1997: 21-22) suggest that the disciplines act as a compass to

inform good understanding goals: “We can look to the disciplines- the

accumulated wisdom of experts who have been thinking their way around

these kinds of caves for several hundred years of human history for help in

finding those corners (of the cave).” Indeed, it was in trying to explicate

understanding goals that researchers devised the Dimensions of

Understanding Framework common to all disciplines, which has become so

important in its own right as a disciplinary lens and will be explored in

Semester 2. The suggestion that the throughlines or throughactions should

be phrased as questions is useful, preserving the interrogative thrust of

inquiry, allowing the teacher to use these two or three central questions as

reflection points throughout the module/course. Perrone (2000: 109) makes it

clear that such questions should be placed before the students so that they

know exactly where this unit is going and what they are expected to

understand at its completion.

The challenging nature of creating and naming understanding goals is

underscored by Wiske (1998: 66-69) in an extended discussion on the issue.

She points out (66) that the concept was not part of the earliest formulations

of the framework and only developed when teachers began to design

activities for teaching generative topics and define criteria for assessing

student performances. This mirrors the struggle for most teachers in trying to

name goals, which often implies the outing of tacit assumptions, the

ownership of the curriculum and the discipline, and the ability to juggle and

manage the complex agenda of other teaching roles. Confusion between

understanding goals and overly narrow behavioural objectives – in my view

the main stumbling block in the acceptance of learning outcomes – also

featured in teachers’ reluctance to name goals. As the project unfolded,

however, understanding goals have proved to be an essential feature of the

framework. The research project’s guidelines and criteria for creating

worthwhile long and short term understanding goals suggest that they:

are most useful when they are explicitly defined and publically posted, when they are arrayed in a nested structure with subgoals leading to overarching goals and when they are focused on key

concepts and modes of inquiry in relevant subject matter (Wiske: 1998: 70).

Publically posting the goals is not only a communicative strategy to let our

students know where we are headed as a group, but is also a key measure of

their progress; the throughline questions, for example, can be used as

reflective points throughout the course. Equally, the nesting of the goals gives

coherence and meaning to otherwise isolated aspects of the course; while the

centrality of the goals often means that they are the very threshold concepts

of the discipline which need to be continually revisited in order to be

understood.

3. How can we foster understanding? (Performances of Understanding)

This question invites us to think of our methodologies, not as ends in

themselves, but as ways of helping students to develop and demonstrate

understanding. As already discussed, performances of understanding, or

understanding performances, consist of activities that both develop and

demonstrate students’ understanding of the understanding goals in question,

by requiring them to use what they know in new ways. Such performances

provide a real context for active learning in the university classroom. Students

are given focused tasks that are integral to the key goals and outcomes of the

course and that challenge their thinking and assumptions. There is coherence

and integration between the goals of the module and the performances that

fulfill these:

The words “doing, thinking, linking” describe the process. These words imply

that active, involved thought was tied to one or more Understanding Goals.

For Performances of Understanding, you need to do things and think about

them. You need to generalize, analogize, predict, classify, make inferences.

You need to try again. You need to think again, over and over and over,

reiterating and refining as you go (Veenema et al, 1997: 24).

Hence, as an iterative process, performances of understanding help students

to build, as well as demonstrate, understanding, challenging stereotypes and

misconceptions: “This performance orientation, actually doing something, is

central to understanding. It is the element missing in most classrooms”

(Perrone, 2000: 110). Such performances make students’ thinking visible,

which makes them consonant with the SoTL approach. Performances provide

documentary evidence, since they go beyond the private thinking of the

students, involving them in publically demonstrating their understanding.

The criteria defining performances of understanding remind us that students

need to engage “regularly, actively and thoughtfully” with the ideas to be

understood. Such criteria indicate that performances are designed so that (i)

students work actively in a novel context with the ideas and concepts to be

understood; (ii) students think with these ideas; (iii) what students do aligns

directly with what they are trying to understand (this is what Biggs (2003) was

getting at) and (iv) what students do shows what they understand (Hetland,

2005: 2).

Such performances should occur at many points in the course, placing the

teacher in a coaching role, helping students with developing concepts,

interpreting data and listening to how students explain probable solutions to

problems. The project has identified three phases of performance that help

scaffold these: introductory, guided inquiry and culminatory performances.

Introductory performances invite students to begin “messing about” with the

issues, allowing teachers to see what students already understand about the

topic and highlighting how the topic might relate to students’ interests,

observations and questions. It is in this phase of the work that we can ‘out’

student pre and misconceptions about the topic in hand. Guided inquiry

performances unfold as the module progresses, focusing on particular

problems and issues relating to the generative topic and goals in question.

Culminatory performances characterise those that require students to harness

what they have learned in earlier performances, presenting it anew on

another, higher level of critical thinking, usually in project or presentation form.

4. How can we tell what students understand? (Ongoing Assessment)

We answer this question by focusing on the On-going Assessments which are

designed to elicit and support students’ incremental understanding. It is

important to highlight that these assessments are the process by which

students get continual feedback about their performances of understanding in

order to improve them. Hence, assessment here is not ‘the tail that wags the

dog’; it is not about teaching to the test, nor about the summative process of

grading and accountability. Rather it is a formative, diagnostic tool, which

helps students to build confidence as they grow into the methods and thinking

of the discipline they are studying. Ongoing assessment is about learning for

understanding and about the criteria, feedback and opportunities for reflection

that are built into the sequence of instruction (Blythe, 1998: 22). Such a focus

on assessment puts up front the idea of letting students into the secret of what

it is we want them to understand. Thus, ongoing assessment begets a focus

on rubrics and making criteria public and on alternative, authentic approaches

that will give students a chance to demonstrate and develop understanding.

Wiske (2005: 84) puts forward a convincing argument that ongoing

assessment supports the development of understanding:

First, students understand what quality work entails when they play an active

part in conducting assessments, for example by joining in the process of

defining assessment criteria and by participating in self- assessments and

peer reviews of draft products…Second, students benefit from seeing how

their fellow learners are approaching a lesson or project. Peer collaboration on

assessment often helps them see how to analyze and improve their own work.

Third, frequent assessments provided by a variety of people – fellow students,

outside advisors, and the teacher, along with self- assessment-may help

students see and accept multiple ways of improving their work. Finally,

teachers who conduct varied ongoing assessments of student work gather a

more complete picture of their students’ understanding in time to design

suitable interventions.

It is interesting to point to the SoTL connections emergent here: ongoing

assessment invites the teacher to ‘go public’ with his/her criteria and invites

the students to engage with these in developing and producing better work. A

peer review process of the work with other classmates is also apparent and

refines performance and achievement. Equally, self- assessment is enhanced

– for teacher and for learner- in the public naming of criteria and their

consonance with the understanding goals of the module/unit, for the reflection

necessary here is made possible by the naming of criteria and, therefore, by

the development of a language of what counts, which can be used to

document and gauge progress.

As teachers began to work with the concept of ongoing assessment, they

refined ideas about how and when assessment rubrics might be designed.

They discovered that it was not always pedagogically advantageous to devise

these at the beginning of a unit, for performances were often new and

teachers only became conscious of their own tacit criteria as they examined

early draft performances. Also, students learned by being involved in the

process of defining criteria; so the latter often emerged in the guided inquiry

phase of the work. As teachers on the project developed multiple forms of

ongoing assessment, the TfU research team perceived some common

categories of assessment activities in relation to the types of understanding

performances. Ongoing assessment of ‘messing about performance’, for

example, is usually informal and conducted primarily by the teacher. The

assessment of the guided inquiry phase tends to become more formal and to

involve students. As clear criteria are formulated, teachers might use them to

scaffold peer assessment of student work, thus giving students the

opportunity to develop an understanding of the criteria in their assessment of

their peers’ work (Wiske, 1998: 79). Though students are familiar with criteria

of assessment by the culminatory phase of inquiry, this is still a formative

process in the early phases of the final draft of the work. The research team

summarized the key features of ongoing assessment as follows:

The criteria for assessment are related to the understanding goals of the

course; the basis for assessment is made explicit and public; assessments

are conducted frequently and generate suggestions for improving work and

assessment comes from multiple sources (Wiske, 2005: 93).

Hence, ongoing assessment is often named as the most challenging element

of the framework, chiefly because teachers must understand its other

elements to approach this one. Furthermore, public posting of assessment

criteria subverts the culture of secrecy surrounding testing, while involving

students in assessment of their own learning is also counter-cultural in

requiring them to take responsibility for their own learning. The new roles and

relationships that such practice begets are not the norm (Wiske, 1998: 81).

The Nature and Role of the Framework

The power of the framework lies in the coherent integration of all four

elements, though each can be analysed separately. With whatever element

teachers begin their inquiry, one element begets the other. It is not a question

of ‘getting it right’, but of “stimulating teachers to make interacting adjustments

in various aspects of their curriculum and pedagogy. Like understanding

itself, using the TfU framework…is a continuing inquiry” (Wiske, 1998: 83).

Note again the SoTL orientation and potential of such an inquiry- one’s

teaching is always open to investigation and improvement and the four

elements of the framework can be seen as points of the compass guiding that

process.

The TfU framework is founded on a definition of understanding as creative

performance. Thus, understanding implies personal investment, invention

and ownership and must be constructed from the learner’s own experience

and intellectual work. Learning to teach for understanding is itself a process

of developing understanding (Wiske, 1998: 83). TfU provides a structure and

language to guide inquiry: “Dialogue with the framework can bring tacit goals

and unconscious pedagogical expertise into clearly articulated forms that can

be assessed, ratified or revised” (Wiske, 1998: 83). The framework not only

serves to orchestrate teaching subject matter to students, but provides a

structure for guiding professional development. This aspect has been

powerful in the current study, particularly in the work with colleagues across

all disciplines, supporting teachers as continuing learners, endorsing their

professional autonomy. TfU is not a deficit model, pointing to teachers’

shortcomings or directing them to follow a particular strategy or curriculum

design: “The role of this framework is not to dictate a mindless enactment of

someone else’s prescription but to stimulate and help educational colleagues

to be mindful in articulating their own prescriptions” (Wiske, 1998: 85).

Linking Research with Practice

The following diagram from the TfU model, reminds us of the intersection

between what the students will do to understand – the performance of

understanding – and on-going assessment