21st Century Learning and Teaching

You Have To Create Understanding By Design!

Understanding, however, involves something beyond mere acquisition for later straightforward use. To understand, students must do something with, adapt, and sometimes question what they (think they) know.

They have to think and rethink.

They must be required to draw inferences and come to realizations, try performing with that understanding, and draw further inferences from what works, what doesn’t, when, and why. The student doesn’t have to merely “know” F=ma or that the Federalists predicted the health-care debate, they have to “realize” the point of the knowledge, its power, and its limits in order to transfer it flexibly and fluently in the future.

Thus, to achieve understanding as an educator, you have to help students “by design” come to realizations that they own and appreciate as insightful. If you don’t, if you just “teach” the understandings you aim to have them possess, you will fail – no matter how “good” the teaching. Indeed, this is the key to grasping the meaning of research on student misconception: misunderstandings persist in the face of pedagogy that doesn’t elicit and challenge student meanings and their meaning-making process. Teachers thus need to be crystal-clear in their own mind which of their goals involve knowledge and which involve understanding and treat each goal accordingly.

Learn more:

https://gustmees.wordpress.com/2015/12/27/what-are-the-best-ways-of-teaching-and-learning-ideas-and-reflections/

https://gustmees.wordpress.com/2014/10/03/design-the-learning-of-your-learners-students-ideas/