The Creation of Understanding by Design

By Heather Ristow,
Graduate Student

The snow pack settles with a resounding “WHOMPH” as I glide out onto Upper Meadow. It is a sound I hope I never hear while standing on a slope for it would surely precede a cascade of snow rapidly running downhill.

Here, on the relatively flat meadow, I am safe and can smile with delight at the sound of this powerful phenomenon. There has been a fresh blanket of snow falling to the earth every day for the last two weeks. The layers are building up; each day’s crystals arrive in slightly different shapes that create distinct tiers in the snow pack. With the addition of my weight onto these stacks, weak layers give way and settle loudly into a more stable position.

In the near-darkness of this early January evening, I marvel at the feeling I have had that many aspects of my life seem to be settling into place smoothly and naturally quite often lately. It is a settling quite unlike the loud, semi-violent whomping of the snow pack being forced into place under my skis. Instead it is one of soft precision, more akin to how I imagine an individual snowflake might land and lock into puzzle-perfect symmetry with its neighbors. It is an alignment of right time, right place, and right people. I feel I have come to a deeper understanding of meaning during class, in planning for teaching, and in my personal life.

My entire approach to teaching has undergone some powerful self-analysis and change in the past few weeks. It began with an excerpt from Understanding by Design (Wiggins and McTighe 2005). During winter break I read an excellent chapter on how to design curriculums from the ground up. Backward design, as it is known, is an approach to teaching that is built around the concepts and understandings that we want out students to have after the lesson. Identifying the goals in advance, we create assessments and activities to structure our teaching.

Last Friday I spoke with a good friend of mine in upstate New York, who is also studying to be a teacher. After our usual catch-up conversation about our lives, we began talking about teaching. Tony spoke with infectious enthusiasm, which is a wonderfully engaging characteristic for a teacher to possess. He was raving about a book I absolutely must read. He lamented that he hadn’t heard of this book before he did his student teaching in a high school biology classroom. He would’ve constructed everything completely differently had he had the knowledge that he gained from this book ahead of time. What book was Tony referring to? Understanding by Design, of course! He was openly jealous that I have already been introduced to these concepts so early in my teacher training.

In planning for winter residential education I have relied heavily on backward design. It is a more intuitive process for me, one that flows naturally out of my own thinking process and my desire to be an effective teacher. The concepts presented in Understanding by Design, coupled with a week of intriguing academics with John and Kevin, have given me a fresh look at how to teach and help students learn. Our first winter academics segment, Instructional Strategies, has us exploring theories of learning, the functioning of the brain, and methods of self-assessment of our teaching. The process of teaching is becoming ever more personal and organic.