Teaching for Understanding: Linking Research with Practice

by Martha Stone Wiske (Editor)

This book presents an innovative approach to teaching that helps students acquire and use knowledge in ways that go beyond rote memorization of facts and figures--to develop a level of understanding that will serve them well throughout their lives. Based on a six-year collaborative research project of school teachers and researchers from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, the book describes what teaching for understanding looks like in the classroom, and examines how teachers have learned to use it.

Part One: Foundations of Teaching for Understanding

1. Why Do We Need a Pedagogy of Understanding?

Vito Perrone

2. What is Understanding?

David Perkins

Part Two: Teaching for Understanding in the Classroom

3. What is Teaching for Understanding?

Martha Stone Wiske

4. How Do Teachers Learn to Teach for Understanding?

Martha Stone Wiske, Karen Hammerness, Daniel Gray Wilson

5. How Does Teaching for Understanding Look in Practice?

Ron Ritchart, Martha Stone Wiske, Eric Buchovecky, Lois Hetland

Part Three: Students' Understanding in the Classroom

6. What Are the Qualities of Understanding?

Veronica Boix Mansilla, Howard Gardner

7. How Do Students Demonstrate Understanding?

Lois Hetland, Karen Hammerness, Chris Unger, Daniel Gray Wilson

8. What Do Students in Teaching for Understanding Classrooms Understand?

Karen Hammerness, Rosario Jaramillo, Chris Unger, Daniel Gray Wilson

9. What Do Students Think About Understanding?

Chris Unger and Daniel Gray Wilson with Rosario Jaramillo and Roger Dempsey

Part Four: Promoting Teaching for Understanding

10. How Can We Prepare New Teachers?

Vito Perrone

11. How Can Teaching for Understanding Be ExtAnded in Schools?

Martha Stone Wiske, Lois Hetland, Eric Buchovecky

Conclusion: Melding Progressive and Traditional Perspectives

Howard Gardner

Martha Stone Wiske is a lecturer and researcher at the Harvard Graduate School of Education where she co-directs the Educational Techono

Genres: Education

400 pages, Hardcover

First published October 15, 1997

Reviews

[Kılıç Koçeri · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am so poor and I can not afford buy this book. Please help me :(

[DWRL Library]

This book requires braving education-theory speak, but its aims are worthwhile: to focus on what the authors call a "performance of understanding," i.e., to shift one's emphasis from products to process in the classroom.

While not useful for everyday teaching ideas, the book offers some questions to ask yourself that might be helpful for curriculum design (or redesign) (see esp. Ch. 3).

[Mark]

Simply put, a road map to a more profound and effective pedagogy. I would think this should be de rigueur reading in any teacher-preparation program if for not other reason than to serve as an antidote to the tendency in education to march students through a succession of decontextualized and and therefore inert facts.

[Kari · Rating 2 out of 5]

Glad to see that a rubric was included to make assessing easier to understand.