Chapter 2: Understanding, Understanding...

This chapter can be simplify through the quote "Understanding is about going beyond the information given".

Understanding is at the core of educational expectations. It is the very essence and foundation in which learning holds on. It is the final objective of teaching and its raison d'etre. So, the challenge is to achieve understanding.

Teachers are responsible for the process of learning in students and their achievements as well as their failures. However, how can teachers know when there is understanding? What do teachers comprehend by understanding? These are some of the questions that might explain some of the current failures of our traditional educational system. Most teachers think that understanding is the sum of grades in a book at the end of the year, determined by the covered units of textbooks. This is of course a tremendous mistake that jeopardizes students learning, motivations, and thinking.

There is a misunderstanding of concepts, therefore learning becomes fruitless.
If you ask me, there is no learning without understanding. Those are two concepts that should always hold hands, because once you understand something, then the next step will be to show your understanding, thus creating learning. And if that learning is continuous, then more understanding should take place.

Nonetheless, this is not something that should solely be assumed. To merely assume it, would be to destroy our own tittle of "teachers".

Wiggins states: We cannot cover concepts and expect them thereby to be understood; we have to uncover their value – the facts that concepts are the result of inquiry and argument.

That is the key! If we want learning and understanding to happen, then the teacher should encourage students to THINK about things they are exposed to. If there is a new concept to teach, the teacher should guide towards the inquiry-based understanding, and let students to shed lights on meaning in their own way. Consequently, students would become learners, and transform knowledge into understanding and beyond. Hence, the role of the teacher in here is to guide students to build their path on learning, and challenging them to go beyond the concepts themselves.

To develop thinking is the key to understanding. Thus, a well thought   process that serves the achievement of understanding and thinking is in the hands of well prepared teachers. Lousy teachers make lousy students.

At least, this is why I understand.

Chapter 1: Backward design

Our current educational system is so awfully grounded that I could understand perfectly what the author meant by the sarcastic sentence: "Throw some content and activities against the wall and hope some of it sticks". This analogy evidences so graphically what happens in schools and in the minds of teachers, that the immediate response one thinks of is almost that the author proposal for planning is a gift from heaven and the most coherent and fruitful basis we all knew but never really understood.

This is why the very question that invades my mind is why did not we have this kind of readings before. The proposal of having the focus on learning instead of teaching changes entirely the perspective from where we contemplate our career, since we are surrounded by teachers who never ever consider learning but just assume it happens at some point of the superficial covered units at school. Therefore, we always knew that something was wrong, but never truly understand what exactly that was, and once we had the power inside the classroom we could not solve the puzzle together. That is what happens in a system where everything is built upon the same principles, and there seems to be no way out of it.

This is why I consider that the three stages of backward design Wiggins proposes us, are so enlightening to our future or current practices. I strongly believe that the rest of the book will have powerful influence in my paradigm for education, for backward design not only challenges you to change the way you plan your classes, but also helps you to think assessment differently in order to foster your students' learning. That is in fact the goal: to learn and to be able to produce learning continuously.