Stuff You Can't Google: Understandings

By Kate Wolfe Maxlow

When he was four, my son and I arrived early at preschool one morning and decided to play the “Ask Google” game.  I enabled the speech search for Google on my phone and he asked Google questions.

“When did T-Rex live?” came his first query. Google cheerfully chirped that T-Rex lived 65 to 70 million years ago during the Cretaceous period.

“What did triceratops eat?” was his next question, and Google answered back that triceratops was an herbivore.

Giggling and a bit punchdrunk on what he assumed was pure omniscience at his fingertips, he happily cried, “Why do I like dinosaurs?”

And Google was silent.

He looked at me.  “Why isn’t it answering?” he asked. I tried to explain that Google can tell us facts, but it can’t always tell us bigger answers, inferences, or, well, life truths (like, “Because dinosaurs represent power as a four year old, that’s very appealing to you.”) It was a sobering lesson for him: there are still some things that Mom can teach him that Google can’t, and some things he’s just going to have to learn for himself.

And that’s one of the most important lessons that PreK-12 educators need to teach our young people today.  Just because Google can answer lots of things, doesn’t mean that Google actually has all the answers.  And furthermore, some great life truths are only going to be learned by exploring the content, asking ourselves essential questions, and wrestling through the answers.

In other words, young people today need us to help them grasp, explore, and work through Understandings--big, overarching inferences about the content, about why it’s important, and how it impacts our lives today.  Also called “Enduring Understandings,” Wiggins & McTighe use both Understandings and Essential Questions in their framework Understanding by Design to help students truly absorb big concepts.

So, what are Understandings?  According to Wiggins & McTighe: “An understanding is an important inference, stated as a specific and useful generalization. … An understanding refers to transferable, big ideas having enduring value beyond a specific topic” (p. 129).  Understandings should be “broad and abstract, universal in application, generally timeless--carry through the ages, and represented by different examples” (p. 130).

In a future blog, we’ll talk more about how to use Understandings in the classroom.  In the meantime, here is a collection of Understandings to get you started. Remember, the point is not to use every Understanding that you see here in your classroom; instead, you want to pick and choose the ones that get at the heart of why students are learning the content that you’re teaching.  You want to come back to them throughout the course of the year, or between grade levels and courses, and use them to show connections between concepts.

Collaboration:

• People create systems to manage conflict effectively.
• Respect and trust are essential component in effective relationships.
• Common language can create a common purpose; lack of a common language can impede a common purpose.
• People work together to achieve common goals.
• Groups are made of individuals with their own thoughts, feelings, wants, and needs.

Communication:

• Language expresses thoughts and feelings.
• Nonlinguistic representations can express thoughts and feelings.
• How a message is communicated affects how it will be received.
• What we think and feel about a concept informs the language we use to describe it; the language we use to describe a concept informs what we think and feel about it.
• Communication is composed both of knowing how to effectively share and effectively receive information.
• People make deliberate choices about what to share and what not to share with others.
• There are multiple perspectives to every story/event.
• Language is inherently changeable.
• We use language to communicate, but cannot rely on it.

Critical Thinking:

• Patterns help us make predictions.
• A whole is made up of parts.
• There are multiple ways to solve a problem.
• The past impacts the present and the future.
• Rules exist for breaking apart and combining numbers, letters/words, and information/facts.
• Fluency with certain knowledge is important to solve problems.
• In some circumstances, it is more useful and efficient to estimate an answer that to produce an exact answer.
• Humans work to understand and describe the world around us through language, numbers, movement, and images.
• We organize information based on relationships.

Creativity:

• Conflict is common element in fiction.
• Fantasy explores truths of human understanding and experiences.
• Creating a work of art is both a reflection of the world and the self.
• Inspiration is often found in the people, places, and events around us.
• There are multiple ways to define creativity.
• Art holds personal meaning both for the artist and the audience, and these personal meaning may or may not coincide.

Citizenship

• The acts of one person can affect many people.
• People create systems to establish and keep order.
• There can be both positive and negative relationships between the good of the individual and the good of the group.
• Citizens influence the government that rules them.

Other:

• We depend on the Earth to meet our basic needs.
• Progress is a type of change.

Have one you’d like to add? Email me or leave a comment here.

Kate Wolfe Maxlow is the Professional Learning Coordinator for Hampton City Schools, Virginia. You can contact her at kmaxlow@hampton.k12.va.us.