Leaving a door unlocked is the same as giving everyone a key.” So warns a sign posted by the campus police in the building where the Teaching for Understanding Project meets every week. But in a funny way, this sign conveys a central message of our project: “Do leave the door unlocked, because that's like giving everyone the key.”
Understanding is not a private possession to be protected from theft but, rather, a capacity developed through the free exchange of ideas. Teaching for understanding requires open, explicit negotiation about what knowledge is, how it is developed and defended, whose knowledge counts, and how knowledge is assessed.
At the Harvard Graduate School of Education, our collaborative research with teachers focused initially on developing a language for formulating this approach to teaching and, subsequently, on integrating these principles into classroom practice. The latter proved to be challenging not only because it requires profound rethinking of curriculum and pedagogy, but also because it violates fundamental norms of schools. In their analysis of the social realities of teaching, Lieberman and Miller (1992) cite two cardinal rules: Be practical. Be private. The Teaching for Understanding Project violates norms of privacy—taboos against sharing knowledge, authority, and responsibility.
“What norm of privacy?” you may counter: “Aren't schools dedicated to sharing knowledge?” Yes, but the flow of information is primarily in one direction—as is the authority to make decisions about what is taught and how success is defined.
The Learner as Teacher
Within classrooms, students are rarely asked to help set the curricular agenda, formulate assessment criteria, or monitor how well those criteria are met. Yet the Teaching for Understanding framework asks students to assume important responsibilities in each of these areas.
A cornerstone of generative curriculum, one of four key facets of the project, is that it connects to students' interests and prior knowledge and is designed to help students identify and develop those connections. One teacher who collaborates on this project teaches 7th grade in a school where the assigned central subject is colonial America. One of her tasks is to devise ways of making this subject generative.
As the year drew to a close, she wanted students to focus on biographies of colonial figures. In preparation, she asked each student to read a biography on anybody—from any time and place. With this experience in mind, the class engaged the question, “What kind of window on history does biography provide?” This discussion—itself a valuable performance of students' understandings about the nature of history and historical inquiry—drew out ideas about point of view, bias, and relationships between individual choices and wider social movements. The students' comments proved helpful in two ways. First, their remarks provided material that the teacher later translated into goals and criteria for their research on colonial figures. Second, the discussion informed the students' responses to the teacher's next question: “How shall we decide who are the five most influential people from the colonial period?”
Out of the classroom debate came the sources, forms, and results of historical influence, as well as competing perspectives on these matters. Ultimately, the discussion determined both the process and the results of students' selection of key figures to study. By explicitly using their ideas to shape curriculum and assessment, this teacher signaled to her students that they were intellectual authorities in the classroom learning community.
Providing ongoing assessment of performances of understanding also violates basic school norms. An important aspect of ongoing assessment is negotiating criteria early and explicitly with students. Goals for understanding—the fourth concept in the framework—are stated up front, and criteria for assessing performances are negotiated explicitly. Then teaching and curriculum are designed to work toward these public and consensual standards.
As one teacher said, “I'm making my expert knowledge explicit and sharing it with my students.” She is doing this in a recursive and collaborative way. For example, her students read a definition of an essay and then analyzed an essay by E.B. White. Through class discussions, they developed a list of features that made the essay strong, and then drafted their own essays on an assigned topic, attempting to incorporate these features. After reading the drafts, the teacher developed a more refined list of criteria specifying positive features of the essays the class had produced, as well as common problems to be corrected. This sheet became the basis for peer assessment of the next drafts. By “recycling students' ideas,” as she put it, the teacher explicitly derived categories and criteria from examples of student work to model a process of analytic thinking.
Sharing Intellectual Authority
Proceeding in this way seems to run counter to common expectations of both teachers and students. Articulating understanding goals and assessment criteria with students up front may be difficult for several reasons. First, teachers may never have made these goals explicit for themselves. Second, they may believe that students aren't able to comprehend their criteria until they have developed deeper understanding through participating in the unit. Or teachers may feel that their criteria ought to evolve in response to students' work. On a deeper level, stating goals and criteria up front challenges the kind of authority that teachers are expected to embody.
Even the teacher described above, who is deeply committed to sharing intellectual authority with her students, acknowledges that she has to summon all her intellectual self-confidence to quiet a nagging voice that wonders, “If I divulge all I know, will you still respect me in the morning?” Leaving the door unlocked may feel like giving everyone a key that should perhaps not be distributed.
Students conditioned to being told what to learn and whether they have learned may resist teachers' attempts to involve them in self-and peer-assessment. This particular teacher found that her students wanted to see her comments on their papers and her grade at the bottom. Thinking that they did their best work the first time, they doubted their capacity to identify and execute needed improvements. Some parents also questioned the teacher's delegation of authority to students.
In response, the teacher renegotiated expectations with her students and, using consensual standards, demonstrated how to critique their own and peers' work. She also met with parents to discuss the students' portfolios, which illustrated the evolution of their work through cycles of critique and revision. Sharing authority included explicit acknowledgment with students and parents that such sharing contradicts accustomed roles, and it required sustained scaffolding and encouragement.
Another teacher reported that student involvement in assessment was one of the most difficult aspects of the Teaching for Understanding Project. He had originally planned to include a “paired quiz” in the unit that he taught for understanding, but in the end decided against doing this. Later he acknowledged that collaborating on a quiz just didn't seem right to do: “The kids are so conscious of not cheating that this is a violation of the way we've been teaching all along.”
The norm against sharing students' knowledge even extends to collaborative learning. According to this teacher, his students didn't think they were learning during collaborative projects. Instead, they regarded group work as “a time to relax, then Mr. K. will tell us what to think.” If sharing knowledge during learning is counter-intuitive, sharing knowledge during a test is downright criminal.
Although neither paired quizzes nor collaborative learning is required in the Teaching for Understanding framework, both practices are consistent with an emphasis on students' active engagement in making and critiquing their own and classmates' knowledge. At root, such activities violate the paradigm that sanctifies knowledge as something the teacher possesses at the beginning, which students acquire during the course, and then demonstrate as their own private possession on a test. To credit students' knowledge, and their capacity to construct and critique knowledge, is to empower students in a way that violates the unspoken norms of most classrooms. Unless this change in the rules of the game is explicitly named and negotiated, students are quite likely to be confused and resistant.
The Teacher as Learner
In a larger sense, the Teaching for Understanding framework encourages teachers to violate norms of privacy that extend to teachers' interactions with their faculty and administrative colleagues. Many teachers say they rarely visit their colleagues, invite them to observe their own classes, or engage in serious conversations about curriculum and pedagogy. How then are teachers to remain active learners?
The teacher as learner is fundamental to teaching for understanding. Teachers who learn model the development of understanding and create a reciprocal relationship with students that legitimates their own struggles to learn. Teachers who learn demonstrate that intellectual authority is provisional because truth is debatable (Peters 1973).
Teachers engaged in the Teaching for Understanding Project have specifically cited discussions with university partners and their fellow teacher-researchers as an important support in their efforts to teach for understanding. These discussions have sometimes provided helpful suggestions about designing curriculum and activities, but, more important, have presented opportunities for reflection, research, and refinement of understandings. As Stenhouse (1983) has argued, research is a necessary basis for teaching.
Leaving the Door Unlocked
Putting a pedagogy of understanding into practice requires a fundamental renegotiation of intellectual authority. What does it mean to be an intellectual authority? Who qualifies to serve in this role? How is authority shared—all of these issues must be addressed if the principles of this project are to be realized.
This renegotiation is no simple matter, for it violates deep-seated, usually unrecognized assumptions and routines concerning the nature of knowledge and the roles of teachers and students. Unless the assumptions underlying practice are deeply challenged, teachers who attempt a pedagogy of understanding may find themselves trying to graft isolated strategies onto the traditional knowledge-transmission paradigm in ways that seem incongruous, confusing, perhaps duplicitous, and possibly counterproductive.
If schools want to support teaching for understanding, they might post the sign about giving away the key as a positive reminder, not a negative warning. Schools and teachers need to develop ways to identify and support successful attempts at unlocking the doors to understanding, shifting from a perspective of intellectual privacy toward one of shared intellectual empowerment—where everyone holds the keys.
Certainly, teachers must not abandon their authority, which derives legitimately from their knowledge of subject matter and their responsibility for guiding students. But they must encourage students to develop their own ways of exercising authority. In short, teachers must be in authority without being authoritarian (Peters 1966).
