Teaching for Understanding

Teaching for Understanding

Research on effective teaching and instructional guidelines emphasized the importance of teaching for understanding. Students who learn content with understanding not only learn the content itself, but appreciate the reasons for learning it and retain it in a form that makes it usable when needed.

Clear explanations and modeling from the teacher are important, but so are opportunities to answer questions about the content, discuss or debate its meaning and implications, and apply it in problem-solving or decision-making contexts.
These activities allow students to process material and make it their own by paraphrasing or putting it in their own words, exploring relationships and making ties to prior knowledge, and identifying its implications for personal decision making or action.

Analysis of programs that have been developed to teach school subjects for understanding have identified a key set of principals that are common to most if not all of them.




1. The curriculum is designed to equip students with knowledge, skills, values and dispositions that they will find useful both inside and outside of school.

2. Instructional goals emphasize developing student expertise within an application context and with emphasis on conceptual understanding of knowledge and self-regulated application of skills.

3. The curriculum balances breadth with depth by addressing limited content but developing this content sufficiently to foster conceptual understanding.

4. The content is organized around a limited set of powerful ideas.

5. The teacher’s role is not just to present information but also to scaffold and respond to students’ learning efforts.

6. The students’ role is not just to absorb or copy input but also to actively make sense and construct meaning.

7. Students’ prior knowledge about the topic is elicited and used as a starting place for instruction, which builds on accurate prior knowledge and stimulates conceptual change if necessary.

8. Activities and Assignments feature tasks that call for critical thinking or problem solving, not just memory or reproduction.

9. Higher order thinking skills are not taught as a separate set of skills curriculum. Instead, they are developed in the process of teaching subject matter knowledge within application contexts that call for students to relate what they are learning to their lives outside of school by thinking critically or creatively about it or by using it to solve problems or make decisions.

10. The teacher creates a social environment in the classroom that could be described as a learning community featuring discourse or dialogue designed to promote understanding.

Many of the principals that describe classrooms that teach for understanding support the idea of vertical alignment, the district initiative as well as the building thinking skills curriculum.

Brophy, Jere (2004). Motivating Students to Learn. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc..