Teaching for Student Understanding

The module we are working on in CEP-800 is intriguing because it really speaks the idea of just teaching factoids to help students prepare for high stakes testing.  Instead, we should be teaching for understanding.  We can determine understanding by giving students authentic ways of expressing their learning to insure that they understand the concepts and are  not just able to recite the facts without any real grasp of their real meaning or how to apply them.  There are some great ways to evaluate understanding.  Having students teach back the concept is one, either to the whole class or in small groups.  Another is to design a real world problem and allow the students to demonstrate their understanding by applying their knowledge in an authentic context.

We watched a video that was produced several years ago which was essentially post-graduation interviews with college graduates.  In these interviews, the graduates were asked a series of fundamental science questions from material that they should have learned first in primary school and then reinforced in high school, and for those whose majors were in the science fields, again at the collegiate level.  To the man, simple concepts, like what causes the seasons, were filled with misconceptions that were cemented into their brains early in their academic careers. 

Our lab for this assignment was to choose  a simple questions that addresses knowledge that should be gained in a educational career, and record interviews with our students to document their responses.  I choose to ask my students (faculty members at the K-12 school that I work for) to describe and explain the water cycle.  I picked three teachers with different ages, backgrounds and subject matter expertise.  I expected that the High School Science teacher would give the most succinct answer, but even the Third Grade teacher, who's curriculum doesn't cover the water cycle yet, answered with clarity and accurateness. 

Download and listen to the interviews here.

 

What I found interesting in these interviews, is that unlike the Harvard video, all of the teachers in my sample were able to recall the facts of and describe the water cycle accurately.  Of course, the Science teacher refreshes herself often as she teaches this concept to her students yearly, but even the English teacher and the Third Grade teacher were able to accurately recall the theory.

 

I think that this demonstrates that teaching is always the best way of cementing information and understanding. We should let our students teach more often as a demonstration of their understanding.