Grant Wiggins, Author at TeachThought

11 Smart Strategies For Improving Your Teaching

Teaching / March 6, 2022

To what things do we as teachers in classrooms tend to be blind? Where should we look to better understand what is happening in our class?

Note that there are no books about education on the list from 1990 – present. Too early to make the call, in my humble opinion.

If the goal a student has to clear is absurdly low, then the assessment is not rigorous even though it is ‘standards-based’ grading.

An authentic assessment is meant to focus on the impact of one’s work in real or realistic contexts.

Initially, in your teaching, you may want to practice aiming only for one Understanding per unit to get a feel for the kind of groundwork.

The problem: transfer of understanding is poor. Students do not understand that the long-term and bottom-line goal of education is transfer.

Mastery of a complex whole requires designing backward from the complex whole and the interesting questions related to it.

Without models of student work to validate and ground them, rubrics are often too vague for students to be useful.

Where should there be obligation and where should there be freedom in choice of pedagogy, models, and curriculum?

Good questions to guide teacher lesson plans should help move the teacher from ‘What will students do?’ to ‘How can I help them understand?”

The point of school is not to get good at school but to effectively parlay what we learned in school in other learning and in life.

Practicing the test all year is like practicing a doctor’s exam all year instead of getting in shape: you are confusing cause and effect.