Grant Wiggins - Understanding by Design (2 of 2)

[MUSIC PLAYING] GRANT WIGGINS: The textbook is not the course. Repeat after me-- the textbook is not the course. The textbook is a resource in support of your goals.

The textbook doesn't know your transfer goals, and it frankly doesn't care about them. I worked for Pearson. I've worked on 11 textbooks now, and it's endlessly interesting and endlessly frustrating because of what a textbook-- well, what a textbook used to be until the Apple announcement.

That's way cool. Way cool. Great possibilities.

Go watch the webinar if you haven't seen it. It's really cool. To say it a slightly different way, This is a conversation that every department should always have.

Again, this follows from the logic of backward design. If these are our goals, what should we do with the resources? You want to know how bad it is?

At a good school-- math department-- I had a woman who freaked out over this exercise. She said, well, all the chapters are important. I mean, she couldn't get beyond that.

That we have to go through all the chapters, and all the chapters are important. I said, well, you do know, of course-- this was in Michigan. I said, you do know, of course, that the textbook is written to be sold in three states.

I mean, you know this-- Florida, Texas, California. It's so bad. As part of my contract with Pearson, I was reviewing a social studies book.

I wish I remember the term. I should've written it down-- some term I never heard. I don't know what the hell it was.

I said, what is this? Texas. [LAUGHTER] So here's a simple example to underscore the TMA logic.

And this is in the design guide that you had excerpts from. But it's useful to realize that this is the kind of conversation that has to take place. So Chuck, what's your goal as a history teacher -- a US history teacher.

Well, I want students to understand the Constitution and three branches of government. That's not a goal. That's the content with a pronoun in front of it.

What we've been saying all morning is what do you want them to be able to do with it? What meanings and transfer do you want? This is not a goal statement.

And by the way, this is not a new idea. Ralph Tyler said this in 1938. He said it again in his book, "The Principles of Curriculum Instruction," 1949.

This is an old idea that you can't design backward from content headings. You have to design backward from the outcomes you want With the use of content. This has huge implications for how you use Atlas Rubicon.

Most maps stink, because they're written backwards from content. They're not written back from performance goals, from understanding goals. OK.

I think I get it. So here's my meaning goal. Well, that has an interesting implication, because I probably won't start in the distant past.

I might go from the present to the past-- a fair amount in my teaching of US history. Just because the book starts with Columbus and the Puritans, doesn't mean our course should start there. This would immediately be clear if you were clear on these meaning goals.

We're beginning with where the students are, with the debate that's in the air. We're beginning from a position of strength, because the students have some knowledge. You start with the Puritans, who the hell knows anything about the Puritans, and who cares?

Transfer goals-- Make sense? So let's have a more extended example-- math. Hey, what's fair-- middle school, seventh grade-- hey, what's fair?

When you say to your parents, that's not fair, or when you say to me, that test wasn't fair, what do you mean? And is there any math involved in that judgment? That's the question we want to consider in this unit.

So T-chart-- fair, not fair. Lots of discussion, lots of argument. Maybe some kid is thinking, what the hell does this have to do with mathematics?

But we've hinted at it, and we're going to slowly but surely get there. All right, guys. We've talked about what's fair and what's not fair.

Well, here is a case-- generalization applied to a particular case. And this is from Japan. There's a big debate at the school down the block about who won this race.

And it's a big deal, because there are talking points and pride and ego involved. And because we're such good math students, they come to us for some assistance. You're looking at the place of finish of the one mile race run.

This student came in first in the whole race. This student came in second. They're in a different class section.

This student came in third, fourth, fifth, all the way down to 74 runners. The asterisks mean that the classes had different numbers of students in them. So what's a fair winner?

Some kids may know how cross country works. Some kids may not. Some kids may have other mental models from other activities or sports or experience, or they may not.

Small group project-- crucial, at least two different answers. That should hearken back to some of what was said understanding is. And then let's argue it out.

And so we have a whole debate, and each makes their presentation-- and we, oh, that's interesting. What do you think? Next day, we do a little jigsaw.

OK. Count off in your group by four. The one's go discuss this.

The two's go discuss this. The three's go discuss this. The four's go discuss this.

Do that for about 10 minutes. Now go back to your group as an expert in that question, and now see if you want to modify your answer to yesterday's running problem. And for that matter, whether you want to modify your original answer to what is fair.

Well, guys, it turns out-- day three-- that mathematicians have some tools that might be able to help us. On day three, we open the textbook, not day one. And now we're going to do some fairly straight ahead work out of the book on measures of central tendency.

And we can go even beyond this to other measures if it seems appropriate, but we want to make sure that there is some control acquisition of these terms. But is this where the unit ends? Well, no.

It has to culminate in meaning and transfer. What do you think about this unit, and how would you compare it to a typical math unit? Be as specific as you can-- small group conversation.

First of all, how does the unit embody what we've been talking about? Two, what are your thoughts about it in a general sense? And three, do a little T-chart comparison.

How does a typical unit go on this or any other topic compared to what's going on in this unit in terms of flow, prioritization, learning, teaching? Informally-- no big deal. 10 minutes.

[BACKGROUND CONVERSATION] [BELL RINGING] Math teachers don't participate. Raise your hand if you hated high school math. Do you want to jump out the building now?

[LAUGHTER] Now consider that this is a pretty not random sample. In the general population, the percentage is worse. This is serious.

The way we do mathematics stinks. And yet, we keep doing it even in good schools. SPEAKER 1: We were actually just talking about that and saying, had we been taught math the way people are starting to teach math, we would have been so much better off.

GRANT WIGGINS: Say why. SPEAKER 1: Because when I was learning math, it was all about, so just memorize the procedure. Here's some facts you need to know.

And then nobody ever really took the time to ask me, so what does it really mean to add numbers? And in an equation with multiple add-ins, why does it matter what order you put them in? GRANT WIGGINS: This is actually in the literature on transfer that the most common student response indicating failure of teaching for transfer is we didn't cover that one.

SPEAKER 2: We were saying that what we liked about this is that it attracted also kids who didn't think they were math kids. GRANT WIGGINS: Of course, you've expanded the pool of interested parties. SPEAKER 2: But also at the same time, might have made kids who thought they were math kids a little bit uncomfortable.

Because all of a sudden they had to explain and bring in writing and explanation, and that sometimes those non-math kids might also be doing well in this. And then grouping them could be really great, because they can see that the non-math kids are succeeding here and the math kids are challenging themselves. GRANT WIGGINS: So it's not only expanding the pool of interested parties, but it's differentiatable by doing it this way.

That's right. SPEAKER 3: We thought this was an obviously exciting way to teach typical mathematical context, but I was wondering if it's actually a fair example to give in the larger context. Because kids love talking about fairness and what's right and how things should, be but is this actually a fair way to model problems in mathematics that might not have as easy and applicability?

GRANT WIGGINS: It's your job to make it happen. That's what it means to have a design constraint. It's your design constraint to make it work for every example.

It's easy to cherry pick, agreed. But if we do it with one, we can do it with ten. And so let's start with the easier ones.

It's also interesting to note when you look at the problem sets from Exeter, many of the problems are not as immediately accessible viscerally. But it's pretty interesting to watch kids struggle over pretty abstract problems, because it involves real thinking and group work and what-if and could it be otherwise. In other words, you can see this happen with a good Socratic Seminar.

I may not be interested in the book we're reading. It may not have any immediacy to me. But even the challenge of making sense of it and bumping heads with other people who make a different sense of it is motivating.

But I think that that's the design challenge. And that's why the last big idea is intellectual engagement. You have an obligation to intellectually engage people who aren't already interested in and good at math, which is the current failure.

It's like the Marines-- we're looking for a few good men. And it shows up over and over and over again in student evaluations, in the failures on national and international tests. Were not reaching anywhere near a number of people.

So I'm saying that's what makes it a design problem. It's our design problem to expand the interest level and differentiate it more. And so we may not be able to do a problem exactly like this for every situation, but it's our obligation to try.

Or to say it the other way around, intellectual engagement is a design consideration. It's not the student's problem. It's our role as designers.

Good anecdote in that respect-- I was on an internet radio show with the guy who designed Rock Band the game. And it was fun. We were talking about feedback, and I asked him about this.

I said, how do you guys work on this subject of feedback? He said, we don't use the word feedback. We use the word incentivize.

How can we keep the player interested in every frame at every level throughout the entire game, because if we don't, then they stop playing and they don't buy the game. What if we had that attitude as teachers? We have to incentivize every lesson, every activity, every day, every unit, every course.

Most teachers just say-- especially the older grades-- tough one on you. You don't like it? Too bad.

My way or the highway.