TEACHERS AND TEACHING FOR UNDERSTANDING

1. TEACHERS AND TEACHING FOR UNDERSTANDING Week 9 Lecture Summary 10 March 2008

2. Learning for Understanding Understanding occurs through: using knowledge to carry out some is shown in: new and challenging activity in order to achieve some desired outcome in a particular situation. Generative Topics: Themes that connect to students’ lives, stimulate inquiry, provoke discussion. Goals for Understanding: “Big ideas”, important concepts, necessary skills, connections and implications. Performances of Understanding : Activities that use knowledge for meaningful purposes, practical and intellectual. Ongoing (Formative) Assessment: Provide criteria, give feedback and support, encourage reflection. Summative Assessment: A ‘performance of understanding’ that requires students to draw on what they have understood to meet some new challenge. (based on Project Zero Framework)

3. Culturally Responsive Teaching Teacher as Curriculum Manager Planning curriculum units to relate to students’ lives by finding out: Who are my students? Where do they live? What are typical parental occupations? What “funds of knowledge” are family members able to share? (Moll, 1992) What are the important characteristics of the neighborhood? How do my students spend their time outside school? What are their areas of interest and expertise? What are important issues of local concern? Teacher as Facilitator Encouraging students to contribute to classroom activities from their own experiences and learning who they are, individually, from what they bring and share. Valuing diversity in students’ areas of interest and expertise and encouraging their peers to do so too. Insisting on respect for every member’s beliefs, values and points of view while encouraging critical, constructive discussion.

4. Designing a Culturally Responsive Unit for Understanding THEME (A Way of Orienting Curriculum Content to Students’ Lives and Interests e.g. Community, Exploration, Water) “Big Ideas”/”Enduring Understandings” (see Curriculum Standards) Activities (that Allow for Inquiry, Dialogue) Check with Principles Launch-----Questions -----Research -----Performance of Understanding Assessment Reflection

7. Designing a New School Complex • Along with homes and offices, many schools were destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. As the authorities think about rebuilding, there is a rare and valuable opportunity to think “outside the box.” • Last week, we considered how to respond to diversity - of interest and aptitude - as well as ethnic, cultural and socioeconomic diversity. We also thought about homogeneous and heterogeneous ways of organizing classes, including the use of “tracking.” • This week, we are imagining we are on the educational planning committee charged to redesign and rebuild the schools for a district of New Orleans that was destroyed by floods. The K-12 population is about 6,000 students and they are from diverse backgrounds, including ELLs, with about half of the total living in poverty. • Issues to consider include: • What size schools do we want for the elementary and secondary levels? • How might we include the community - parents, local businesses, etc.? • Should expectations and the curriculum be the same for all? If not, on what basis should we plan to build in differences? • How can be meet the requirement that there be equal opportunities for all students?

8. Teachers as Learners • Everybody needs to continue to learn about: • relating to other people; one’s partner and children; one’s community; • And most important, about oneself. • We all need to be reflective, lifelong learners. • As teachers, in particular, we need to continue to learn about learning and teaching in order to be as effective as possible in helping our students to learn, and in improving the institution in which we work. • Teacher Research Groups •  Mutual Support •  Shared Focus •  Individual Investigations of Topics of Interest •  Discussion of Selected Reading •  Conference Presentations • Writing for Publication For examples, take a look at Networks, the Online Journal for Teacher Research, particularly Vol 6 (1). http://journals.library.wisc.edu/index.php/networks

9. Developing Inquiring Communities in Education Project (DICEP) Model of Collaborative Action Research

10. Adopting a Critical Stance • “Today’s teachers for social justice dispute modernistic “scientific” research that offers nuggets of certainty about what makes schools “effective.” Instead, they embrace empirical research and theory that illuminate from multiple perspectives schooling dilemmas and their effects on particular students. They turn to colleagues and experts for critical dialogues about how to think about challenges, rather than turning to them to receive solutions. Just as teachers for social justice resist having themselves “fixed” and “improved” by tradition-minded experts and authorities, they are unwilling to become similar authorities for their own students” (Oakes & Lipton, 2003, p. 35). • Instead of accepting uncritically the accounts of issues in the sciences and social studies that are presented by the school textbooks and by the media, they encourage students to ask: • whose interest is being served? • whose interest is being ignored? • and then to search for answers to those questions as a basis for considering the implications for their own lives. When possible, they encourage students to take action in their local community to advance the struggle for social justice.

11. Final Reflections What are some important things you have learned during this course? How have you learned? What have you learned about yourself as a learner? Are your answers the same as those of the other members of your study group? [Questions for next week’s Forum]