Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe, Understanding by Design, 2005, p. 35
Chapter two identifies two different but interrelated terms. People usually use “know” and “understand” as similar words but although they can be confused both suggest different ideas. While knowing deals with the facts, verifiable claims, a coherent body of ideas, understanding implies the meaning of facts, the theory beyond this, the understanding of why it is. After reading this chapter I realized how important are these terms when analyzing the objectives we propose when teaching English as a foreign language, What do we expect from our students?, Should students know or understand?. According to my point of view I should expect students to take what they learned in a lesson and be able to apply it to other situations. According to the author this is called transfer. In education, students should be able to transfer learning to many other setting using the tools given by us.
I cannot stop thinking in real life situations that represents the idea of this chapter. My mom loves cooking and she does not need a recipe to prepare something, she understand how to do it and if anything goes wrong she understands the reason and can fix it. This is because she understands the theory that provides coherence and meaning to cooking.
Baking without an understanding of the ingredients and how they work is like baking
blindfold(ed)…sometimes everything works. But when it doesn´t you have to guess at
how to change it.
Rose Levy Berenbaum, The Cake Bible, 1988, p. 469.
I agree with you. Especially if we want our students to communicate in English we need them to know grammar rules and transfer that knowledge. When we talk in our mother tongue we never thing about grammar rules, we just use them. In fact we understood them at school, many years after acquiring the language.
ResponderEliminarI think , we need to know something first in order to uderstand it later. We learn how to walk step by step.That makes me think that we require to follow some steps, like your mom´s recipe. ( beautiful example )
ResponderEliminar