YOU KNOW YOU ARE TEACHING FOR UNDERSTANDING WHEN ...
The learning is generative:
Instruction is focused around a few central topics.
The topics are personally significant for you and your students.
Students are actively engaged in their work.
An astmosphere of genuine inquiry pervades the classroom.
The understanding goals are clear and explicit:
Overarching goals or througlines are explicitly stated and posted in the classroom.
Goals for particular units are closely related to overarching goals.
You and your students regularly discuss and reflect on unit-long and overarching goals to help students make the connection between what they are doing and why they are doing it.
Students are working on performances of understanding almost constantly:
Students work actively in varied formats: pursuing projects and reflecting alone, collaborating and conferencing in small groups, and interacting in whole groups.
Students can explain why they are doing what they are doing.
You spend time coaching, conferencing, leading, participating in discussions, and sometimes lecturing.
Students are thinking and making that thinking visible in the contexts of performances of understanding that challenge their misconceptions, stereotypes, and rigid thinking.
The room is filled with student work, both finished and in process.
Responsibility and authority for the work is shared between you and your students.
The assessment is ongoing:
Students engage in cycles of drafting, reflecting, crtitiquing, responding to, and revising their own and others' work.
You and your students share responsibility for assessment.
Everyone assesses work according to stated criteria and standards for quality, which are closely related to the understanding goals.
Assessment is often casual, conversational, and spontaneous; periodically it is more formal, recorded, and planned.
Responsibility and aithority for the work is shared between you and your students.
