“How does this particular lesson fit within the larger enterprise of understanding I am striving for? Teachers can then begin to focus on the goals of a particular lesson: With which ideas do I want students to begin to grapple? Where are the complexities and nuances that we need to explore? How can I push students’ understanding and move it forward? With these questions answered, teachers are ready to identify the source material and the kinds of thinking that might best serve the exploration of that material. Only then are teachers in a good position to select a thinking routine as a tool or structure for that exploration.” – “The Power of Making Thinking Visible” Ron Ritchhart & Mark Church - Page 7 p4
The process for planning for learning is undoubtedly challenging. It is a process that requires us as educators to balance and respond to multiple and frequently divergent pressures. It is a juggling act. On the one hand we have the demands of the curriculum. In this air between our hands, we have the needs and interests of our students, the demands of standardised assessments, community expectations, school and system pedagogical models, and cross-curriculum priorities to name just a few of the balls we are juggling. Our aim is to bring all of these into a cohesive whole. But where do we begin and how do we judge what matters most?
When we approach this task with key questions in mind, we focus our thinking on how we might plan learning experiences and opportunities that will have the impact we desire. These are the sorts of questions Ron Ritchhart encourages us to ponder as we plan the lessons we will teach. The questions shared in the paragraph above invite us to consider how the lesson we are planning for will fit within “the larger enterprise of understanding”. Thinking about this matter of the larger enterprise of understanding is a crucial step if we are to plan for an arc of learning that has real bite but thinking at this scale is not always the norm.
In a teaching for understanding framework, teachers are encouraged to develop understanding goals in multiple flavours. At the largest scale, there are course through lines. These are understanding goals at the scale of the significant understandings at the heart of a discipline. In Science, students should develop across their years of learning an understanding of the scientific method. In History, the concept of change is an inescapable, recurring theme. A level down from these are the unit long understanding goals which communicate the essential concepts to be unpacked throughout a unit of learning, and these are developed through more compact understanding goals that might be achieved through a lesson or short sequence of performances that the students engage in and with. The key is to be clear on what these understanding goals are, what they look like, how they fit together and how they might be achieved.
The questions that Ron and Mark invite us to engage with are rich with possibility. They invite us to consider the three key pieces of the puzzle of how understanding goals are best approached. There is a question for identifying how the learning intention in front of us for this lesson fits into the longer-term goals we have for our learners. There is thinking about how we begin and an important focus on the ideas that our students will begin to grapple with. After all, learning is a consequence of thinking, and as Dylan Wiliam:
“The crucial thing is that teachers are involved in a creative act of engineering environments within which learning takes place. Teachers are responsible for creating those learning environments but you cannot do the learning for the learner.” - Dylan Wiliam
There is consideration of the complexity involved and the levels of nuance that comes with all learning. Surely if we hope that our students will achieve deep learning, we must engage our students with learning that offers depth and thus we must have developed in our minds a conception of where the deep learning lies. Finally, there is consideration for how we will push for understanding.
What is crucial is that we consider these questions before we approach other aspects of the planning process. Yes, we will consider pedagogical moves. We will plan for the thinking that our students will require. We will plan a rich range of learning activities and use a variety of stimulating resources. We will utilise a variety of learning scaffolds, and these may include routines for thinking. We will consider learning intentions, and we may publish these for our learners to digest as they learn. We will do all of these things, but we will do them with our eye always on the larger enterprise of understanding that we are striving for.
by Nigel Coutts