What if knowledge isn’t the main idea?

I’ve been spending some time over the last few weeks doing some research on a writing project and happened to run across on old post of mine from several years ago. The post is based on some comments made by the late Grant Wiggins. Wiggins spent much of his time working with Jay McTIghe to develop and share their ideas around what they called Understanding by Design.

UbD focuses on making intentional decisions in the instructional planning process – being clear about what they called “the end in mind.” You then work back from there to ensure that everything that you’re asking kids to do is aligned to those goals. It makes a ton of sense.

In the article titled “Everything You Know About Curriculum May Be Wrong,” Wiggins spends some time sharing thoughts about the balance between teaching foundational knowledge and historical thinking process. And I know it’s summer but it’s always a good time to think about ways to do our jobs better.

So . . . a History Tech flashback post:

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Training kids to think critically, to persuade effectively, and to communicate well. That’s what we need to be doing. And it sounds great – right up until you try and write an assessment outlining those skills in measurable ways.

So it was nice running across a recent article by Grant Wiggins of Understanding by Design fame. Wiggins does a great job of articulating the true purpose of school – preparing kids for life. And not in some vo-tech or career cluster sort of way. But with content specific skills that allow kids to ask good questions, make good decisions, and think flexibly.

Grant Wiggins suggests

So, suppose knowledge is not the goal of education. Rather, suppose today’s content knowledge is an offshoot of successful ongoing learning in a changing world – in which ‘learning’ means ‘learning to perform in the world.’

How cool is that?

As odd as that might sound for academics, it makes perfect sense in our everyday lives. The point of child-rearing, cooking, teaching, soccer, music, business, or architecture is not ‘knowledge’; rather, knowledge is the growing (and ever-changing) residue of the main activity of trying to perform well for real.

It would be very foolish to learn soccer (or child-rearing or music or how to cook) in lectures. This reverses cause and effect, and loses sight of purpose. Could it be the same for history . . . learning? Only blind habit keeps us from exploring this obvious logic. The point is to do new things with content, not simply know what others know . . .

So what would that look like in a history class?

We need to start thinking like video game designers. (Long time readers know that I’ve talked about this before, once or twice. I love games.)

I also love how great video games start. You don’t have facts or any sort of information. You have a problem or a challenge that needs to be solved. You begin to gather data, generate questions, and look for clues. In the process, you learn the foundational information. And you solve the problem.

So why not think like a video game designer? Give kids a problem to solve and start ’em off with a few guiding questions.

For the last few years, I’ve been using one of my favorite compelling questions to illustrate this. Ready?

What really happened on the morning of April 19, 1775 at Lexington Green? How do you know?

Kids start to figure out that, well . . . we’re not really sure. We’ve got lots of facts and primary documents and eye witnesses and information – all saying different things with little agreement among any of it. So kids have to start asking questions about reliability and bias and authorship and sourcing and context and timing and corroboration and all sorts of fun history stuff.

And just like a video game, kids are practicing and competing in the game of history – solving problems and creating answers using evidence, rather than reading the answers from a textbook. The skills they learn here are transferable to the next problem where we introduce more complex problems, requiring even more complex skills.

Wiggins ends his article with a few questions for the nay-sayers:

• If curriculum is a tour through what is known, how is knowledge ever advanced?
• If learning requires a didactic march through content, why are movies and stories so memorable – often, more memorable than classes we once took?
• If a primary goal of education is high-level performance in the world going forward, how can marching through old knowledge out of context optimally prepare us to perform?
• If education is about having core knowledge, and we are more and more teaching and testing all this knowledge, why are results on tests like NAEP so universally poor, showing that over decades American students have not progressed much beyond basic “plug and chug”?

How are you working to design work for your students that focuses on process as much or more than content? And what does that look like?