Last January, I got a golden opportunity to participate
in Fulbright TEA Fellowship administered by IREX and funded by the Department
of State, US. As part of the fellowship, I was placed at California State University,
Chico, the cultural, economic, and educational centre of the northern
Sacramento Valley and home to both California State University, Chico and
Bidwell Park, the country's 26th largest municipal park and the 13th largest
municipally-owned park. During the fellowship, we reaped countless benefits
from academic as well as personal tours across California. Observing classes in
some local schools and their academic calendars, I asked myself a question
‘What is the commonest challenge that is faced by teachers everywhere?’ The
simple answer is a syllabus.
An overload of content
In the case of California, the problem is magnified in
certain subjects like science, history, maths, where the knowledge base
continuously expands. This problem of content ‘overload’ requires teachers to
make choices constantly regarding what content to include and what content to
rule out. So, The Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts &
Literacy in History/Social Studies,
Science, and Technical Subjects (hereafter referred to as “the Standards”) are
the result of an extended, broad-based effort to fulfil the charge issued by
the states to create the next generation of standards in kindergarten to grade
12 to help ensure that all students are literate and college and career ready
no later than the end of high school. This describes what a student typically
has to know and be able to do at each performance level.
Very highly ambitious content demands can seem daunting
to teachers to teach and achieve targeted results. Apart from the amount of
content identified, some objectives are stated in a way that makes them
difficult to address. Some objectives are too big. For example, look at this
one from a grade 10 textbook of Social Studies ‘At the end of the lesson,
students will be able to identify the causes of girl trafficking in Nepal.’ But
how many causes? What about the solutions? Such a statement is simply too broad
to provide goal clarity and guidance to instruction and assessment. To make the
matter worse, teachers at Nepal’s institutional schools are compelled to teach
three English textbooks: English communicative course, English grammar and
English literature. Each of these contains at least 25 lessons. In total, 75
lessons have to be taught once a year. How feasible is it? Some states of
America have endeavoured to address this problem by publishing and identifying
more specific grade-level benchmarks and specifying performance indicators.
Nevertheless, the challenges of content overload persist. Grant Wiggins and Jay
Mc Tighe propose that learning results be considered in terms of understanding
the “big ideas” and core process within the content standards. More specific
facts and skills are then taught in the context of the larger ideas and questions.
This approach provides a means of managing large quantities of content
knowledge. It is a relief to teachers.
Planning Backward [Flipped planning]
Being a teacher, we want our pupils to explore
essential and sensible questions and come to understand important ideas
contained in content standards, then we have to make plans accordingly. Success
can be derived only from perfect planning. If a student fails an exam, it isn’t
student but the teacher’s plan has failed. Hence, curriculum designers are recommended
a three-stage background design process for curriculum planning. The concept of
planning backward from desired results is no longer new. We’re all well aware
that successful people in the world are result-driven. They’ve plan A and plan
B with the end in mind. It’s like deductive and inductive methods. Backward
planning asks teachers or curriculum designers to consider these
stages—identifying desired results, determining acceptable evidence and
planning learning experiences and instruction.
For backward design, teacher planning is focused on classroom
activities. And activities should be engaging, hands-on, and child-friendly. Although
this approach is old, studies have shown that the use of backward design for
planning courses, units and individual lessons on purpose leads to more
specific and clearly defined goal, more appropriate assessments, and much more
purposeful teaching in class. It’s true many teachers believe their job is to
cover the course. Contrary to this, a true teacher’s job is to teach for
learning of important things out of the content, to ensure students’ clear
understanding and make necessary adjustment to cater to the need of each
student based on his or her results. Textbooks make a good resource but it
shouldn’t constitute the syllabus any more. This sort of planning drags
teachers out of their comfort zone.
“Big ideas”
A ‘big idea’ is directly linked with fundamental
concepts, principles, theories, and processes that should serve as the major
part of curricula, instruction, and assessment. Big ideas mirror expert understanding
and anchor the discourse, inquiries, discoveries, and arguments in a field of
study. They provide a basis for setting curriculum priorities to focus on the
most essential content.
Big ideas work as the “conceptual Velcro for a topic
of study. Big ideas integrate discrete knowledge and skills into a larger
intellectual frame and bridges the gulf existing between specific facts and
skills. Concentration on these larger ideas helps students see the purpose and
relevance of content.
Isolated facts don’t transfer. Big ideas are so
powerful that they embody transferable ideas, applicable to other topics,
inquiries, contexts, issues and problems. Since we are humans, we can never
impart all the knowledge on a given topic, a focus on the ‘big ideas’ helps to
manage information overload. Big ideas provide the conceptual thought lines
that give a solid foundation to a coherent curriculum.
A ‘big idea’ is inherently abstract. Its meaning isn’t
always obvious to students, and simply covering a book or a syllabus won’t
guarantee student understanding. “Coverage” is unlikely to cause genuine
insight; understanding must be earned. Thus, the idea must be uncovered – its meaning
discovered, constructed or inferred by the learners, with the support of the
teacher and well-designed learning experiences.
Knowledge versus Understanding
When we plan backward, we’ve to know clear differences
between ‘knowledge’ and ‘understanding’. They’re frequently used as synonyms.
Knowledge just refers to the ability to recognise or identify something;
for example, a new word in a text passage of an article or a book, which you
“know”, probably from the standpoint of having seen it before, but you don’t
know how to use it.
Understanding goes deeper
about something. To understand something you’ve to gain knowledge and put it
into practice. ‘Knowledge’ is more inclined to theory, whereas ‘understanding’
is more inclined to practice.
Understanding also is revealed when students
autonomously make sense of and transfer their learning through authentic
performance. Six facets of understanding—the capacities to explain, interpret,
apply, shift perspective, empathise, and self-assess—serve as indicators of
understanding. It has many different connotations. Many aren’t aware that
Benjamin Bloom and his colleagues avoided using the term in their taxonomy of
the cognitive domain because it was seen as imprecise.
Responsive teaching
As a teacher, it’s our sole responsibility to offer
our learners flexibility in the response mode. The more flexible were, the more
confidently students become and they show how better they have understood what
we’ve taught them. Some pupils are better spoken. Some students may have
limited writing skill. And if we document student response in writing for
evaluation, our judgement won’t be fair.
It’s important to note that although we may offer
students options to demonstrate what their knowledge is and what their
understanding is, our evaluation rubric has to be same. Responsible teachers
need to work hard to find a balanced approach between individualised
assessments and standardised, ‘one-size-fits-all’ measures.
Yes, there is an urgent need for balance between
student construction of meaning and teacher guidance. A teacher has to plan for
all three types of learners—visual, auditory and kinaesthetic. In addition, a
teacher has to be adept at choosing instructional strategies that address the
needs of all types of learners, manage classroom for conducive environment and
create an atmosphere of democracy in the classrooms.
A final thought
We have to change the stereotype that we cannot teach
old dogs a new trick. Teachers always have to be receptive to new ideas. They’ve
to reflect on their teaching. We once were students. We’ve to put ourselves in
their shoes to better teach. There’re many reasons to keep up with the old
habits. So the first step is to determine whether we’ve the willpower to do
better? There should be a principle of
substitution at work not one of addition. We shouldn’t eat junk food and then
take medicine later.
