The Teaching For Understanding Guide

"This handbook will both encourage and assist those teachers who take on the important challenge of helping their students to think deeply and resourcefully and to use that intellectual power constructively." --Theodore R. Sizer, chairman, Coalition of Essential Schools Walks teachers through the "teaching for understanding" process. The authors offer classroom examples, practical tips, and worksheets to help clarify the process. They also show how to select engaging and appropriate topics, set coherent unit and course goals, create dynamic learning activities, improve student performance through continual feedback, and more.

TINA BLYTHE is a project coordinator for Project Zero at Harvard University's Graduate School of Education. Contributions were also made by the teachers and researchers of Harvard's Teaching for Understanding Project. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts

"A Baedeker's Guide to learning to understand--the ability to know and resourcefully use that knowing--and to teaching toward that goal.... This handbook will both encourage and assist those teachers who take on the important challenge of helping their students to think deeply and resourcefully and to use that intellectual power constructively." --Theodore R. Sizer, chairman, Coalition of Essential Schools

"In exploring the process of teaching for understanding as teachers practice it, this monograph succeeds, as few do, in providing different ways of entering a teachers world. Building on teachers' 'inside knowledge,' the authors engage, provoke and coach-in just the right ways-so that I, as a teacher, excited by these new ideas, want the semester to begin tomorrow!" --Ann Lieberman, Teachers College, Columbia University

"This handbook is a Baedeker's Guide to learning to understand--the ability to know and resourcefully to use that knowing--and to teaching toward that goal. The text is a readable, comprehensive mixture of argument, explanation, direction and example. The And of 'deep understanding' is a complex idea and in many schools a lamentably unfamiliar one. While never trivializing the subtlety of the task, this handbook will both encourage and assist those teachers who take on the important challenge of helping their students to think deeply and resourcefully and to use that intellectual power constructively." --Theodore R. Sizer, Chairman

"The Team at Harvard Project Zero has approached the search for [ital]understanding, using skills and knowledge, from an incredibly pragmatic perspective. They offer complex ideas and sophisticated strategies in a style that is both readily understandable and full of implications and directions for classroom use. Teachers and administrators will benefit from this thoughtful work!" --Thomas R. Hoerr, director of the New City School in St. Louis, MO

"Teaching that has understanding at its heart needs a powerful structure that nurtures thinking, personal engagement and meaningful encounters with curriculum. In our efforts to make teaching meaningful and learning matter, the Teaching for Understanding framework has been an invaluable resource." --Susan Elhardt and Richard Walker, adjunct professors through Seattle Pacific University

1. What This Guide Is (and Isn't).

2. Understanding Understanding.

3. The Teaching for Understanding Framework.

4. Generative Topics.

5. Understanding Goals.

6. Performances of Understanding.

7. Ongoing Assessment.

8. Tips and Tools for Planning and Teaching.

9. Teaching for Understanding and Other Educational Practices.