The Importance of Understanding By John L. Brown

This is the first How-To in the series, Teaching for Understanding in the Visual and Performing Arts, based on the principles of Understanding by Design by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTigue.

Experiencing Understanding

One of the greatest benefits of the visual and performing arts is their capacity to expand students' understanding of themselves, their world, and their ways of constructing personal meaning while engaging in the process of self-expression. In fact, it is virtually impossible for any of us to remain in a passive, "knowledge-recall" state of being when we are authentically engaged in creating visual products or participating in meaningful performance-based artistic activities.

To confirm this assertion, take a minute to reflect on a powerful and meaningful experience you remember from your education in a specific area of the arts. For example, think of a significant memory related to expressing yourself via some visual process or product or through a medium such as drama, music, or dance. In all likelihood, the experience you are recalling reflects the active engagement of your heart, your mind, and your body in some form of experience-driven learning. Your memory also very likely has you moving beyond the mere acquisition of information or mechanical modeling of a skill or procedure toward some form of internalized state of engagement and intellectual and emotional "flow."

As you recall your experience, you can observe yourself engaged in a wide range of behaviors, including (1) actively applying what you were learning to authentic problems and real-world decisions; (2) interpreting your world using this internalized knowledge; (3) explaining your experiences in verbal and non-verbal forms so that others can relate to and understand them; (4) analyzing conflicting perspectives related to your experiences; (5) expressing empathy for those whose perceptions and judgments were different than your own, confirming your growing ability to "walk in their shoes"; and, (6) throughout the experience, demonstrating growing self-knowledge and an expanding ability to reflect upon, assess, and revise your own thinking and behavior.

Introducing "Understanding by Design"

These six mental/emotional dispositions and behaviors are what Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe, authors of the instructional design framework Understanding by Design (UbD), call "the six facets of understanding." This four-part series will investigate the implications of UbD for educators currently working in the fields of the visual and performing arts, emphasizing how UbD strategies and principles can help you to reinforce students' proficiency in using the six facets.

Specifically, this series will make the case that education in the arts almost inevitably involves teaching for understanding. In fact, the great master teachers in the visual and performing arts almost inevitably demonstrate strategies, processes, and mindsets consistent with—whether intuitively or deliberately—Understanding by Design. It is, in effect, familiar territory for arts educators.

This first article will frame the "big ideas" and controlling principles of UbD, particularly the idea of backwards design and its implications for education within the visual and performing arts. The second article will concentrate upon how arts educators can design and help students to achieve desired results that reinforce understanding, including enduring understandings, essential questions, and enabling knowledge objectives aligned with the six facets of understanding. The third article will reinforce the value of a balanced, multi-faceted approach to assessing and evaluating student achievement in the arts. Finally, the fourth article will explore the instructional strategies advocated by UbD to promote maximum student understanding in all arts areas.

Understanding by Design at a Glance

Although we will investigate each of the following ideas in greater detail in subsequent articles, here are the major assertions made by Understanding by Design:

1. Great teaching and learning emphasize students' understanding, rather than mechanical or formulaic knowing and doing.
2. Student learning is insufficient if the learner does not internalize what he or she is learning and develop a capacity for using it with a level of independence and self-understanding.
3. All of us learn more effectively when we construct personal meaning about what we are learning, including reinforcement of our evolving capacity for understanding how our learning pertains to our experience and the world beyond the classroom.
4. The best instructional designs are "backwards," beginning with the end in mind and moving through three interrelated stages. As we design instruction, we must begin with desired results (Stage One); then determine how to assess and evaluate student progress relative to those results (Stage Two); and only then design and implement instructional strategies to promote student achievement of desired results (Stage Three).
5. Desired results must clearly specify what students are expected to know (e.g., facts, concepts, generalizations, rules, principles, laws); do (e.g., skills, procedures, processes); and understand (e.g., student behaviors reflecting the six facets of understanding) as a result of the teaching and learning process.
6. Teaching for understanding demands that we organize our curriculum conceptually, helping students to develop a sense of the whole-rather than just the parts. We help students make sense of what they are studying through strategies such as revisiting big concepts and ideas, exploring statements of overarching understanding, and revisiting open-ended, interpretive questions that go to the heart of our content (i.e., essential questions).
7. Assessments must form a "photo album," rather than a "snapshot" of student achievement. We need to monitor student progress across time, adjusting our teaching to accommodate students' emerging strengths and needs. Great assessment involves a balanced combination of forms, ranging from tests and quizzes to reflective assessments, academic prompts, culminating performance-based projects, peer review and response groups, and portfolios.
8. Students need to play an active role in the assessment and evaluation process, including clearly understanding and applying the evaluation criteria for which they are responsible.
9. We can help students understand what they are studying by considering seven instructional design questions, referred to in UbD language as "W.H.E.R.E.T.O.":

• W=Where are we going and why are we going there?
• H=How will we hook and engage students' interest?
• E=How will we provide experience-based learning activities to help students explore what they need to know, do, and understand?
• R=How will students be encouraged to revisit, revise, rethink, and refine their learning?
• E=How will students be asked to self-evaluate and self-express throughout this unit?
• T=How will we tailor teaching and learning to maximize students' strengths and address students' areas of need?
• O=How will we organize students' learning experiences to help them move from initial concrete experience toward conceptual understanding and independent application?

In subsequent articles for this series, we will "unpack" each of these nine instructional design principles from the perspective of the visual and performing arts. As part of this journey, we will revisit two essential questions: (1) How can we ensure that students of the visual and performing arts achieve a deep level of understanding of what they are studying? (2) How can we use the Understanding by Design framework to facilitate this process?