“Enduring Understandings”
# Reference
- Source: #EDUC130_3
- Keywords: Cards/permanent notes
- Relevant Notes:
# Notes
- Enduring Understandings are ==the insights that a learner gains by doing the work of understanding==, i.e. making connections in our learning that help us make sense of and integrate new knowledge into existing understandings.
- In the Understanding by Design framework…
- the Big Idea can be thought of as the point on the horizon you are steering towards
- Essential Questions can be thought of as the locomotive pulling your students forward (an engine of inquiry)
- Enduring Understandings can be thought of as ==the sights and memories one remembers when looking back.==
- Enduring understandings summarize important ideas and core processes that are central to a discipline and have lasting value beyond the classroom. They synthesize what students should understand–not just know or do–as a result of studying a particular content area.
- Moreover, they articulate what students should “revisit” over the course of their lifetimes in relationship to the content area (Wiggins and McTighe, 2003).
- In summary, enduring understandings:
- Frame the big ideas that give meaning and lasting importance to such discrete curriculum elements as facts and skills;
- Can transfer to other fields as well as beyond the classroom;
- “Unpack” areas of the curriculum where students may struggle to gain understanding or demonstrate misunderstandings and misconceptions;
- Provide a conceptual foundation for studying the content area and;
- Are deliberately framed as declarative sentences that present major curriculum generalizations and recurrent ideas.
# How Can I Use Enduring Understandings in My Course?
- Enduring Understandings, along with Big Ideas and Essential Questions, guide a Backward Design process by framing the first stage: ==Identifying desired results.==
- You can use Enduring Understandings in in planning your course as a way to help identify what you expect students to get out of the course and how those “results” will be distributed between assignments and scaffolded through course content.
- Identifying your Enduring Understandings will help you clarify and prioritize your course design.
- Enduring Understandings should be stated as ==full sentences.==
- What are the broad understandings that connect the content in your course?
- What should students come away understanding about the topic of your course?
- These might not be ideas that you study directly, but they likely do come up repeatedly through the semester and underly a number of the decisions about what to include vis-a-vis content. These understandings are not facts but inferences, so it may help to state them as a proposition or maxim.
- Resources