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Volume 30, Number 2, October 2002

Focus on Understanding

Carol Koechlin and Sandi Zwaan

Often we have heard teachers say, "This is not what I asked for! These kids just don't get it! Why don't they understand?"

We have also heard students express a different point of view, saying, “Why don’t teachers understand how we think? How can we make sense of all this stuff? I’ve got all this information, so what?”

This tension, which exists between teachers and students and students and parents when information tasks are assigned, is very real. There are many causes, but there are also solutions. Students do not need to flail and flounder in a sea of meaningless data waiting for a lightning bolt to strike and sort it out for them. Instead, they need skills and strategies to help them explore and determine their information need, access appropriate data, process the data they have acquired and communicate their new understanding to others.

This process is not new to teacher-librarians.

Why the angst?

Students, teachers and parents all aspire to achieve the current curriculum goals. New curriculum standards have been developed to reflect the growing complexity of global reality. The rapid emergence of information technologies and the glut of information available to students create new challenges. Every grade and subject area has been impacted. Our close investigation of current curriculum identified innumerable expectations that require sophisticated levels of complex information processing. Students are required to form opinions, discover cause, evaluate effect, make relationships, demonstrate understanding and so on. In practice however, students are not achieving as well as expected with skills related to the processing of information. This difficulty that students experience when dealing with information is a cross-curricular concern and affects student success in reading and writing as well as content subjects.

Some of the challenges

How can we identify the specific problems students are having that contribute to this anxiety?
How can we help students understand difficult concepts and demonstrate their understanding in meaningful ways?
How can we help students make connections between their own ideas and those of others so they can create new meaning?
How can we help students see relevance between the tasks they are asked to perform and real world experiences?
How can we help teachers to design more effective and engaging information tasks?

Teacher-librarians have the tools and skills set to be of great assistance to teachers in the creation of information tasks. We have knowledge of a wide range of information resources, skills and technologies that are essential for designing effective information-related activities. We know that if information tasks are not carefully crafted, they can lead to plagiarism or a low level regurgitation of facts and data. We understand that if students are not challenged to process the data they gather, they are not likely to do so. We can help teachers carefully structure and scaffold learning experiences to ensure student success. Teacher-librarians can and should have considerable impact on the teaching and learning process. Because we work with all teachers and students, we are in a unique position, with the potential to contribute a great deal to the collective culture of a school. We can impact both teaching and learning.

How can we build the capacity of the school library program to make a difference in student achievement? We offer six key actions for your consideration.

1. Believe that you can make a difference

There is plenty of academic research indicating the strong correlation between student achievement and an exemplary school library program (see Haycock, 1992; Krashen, 1993; Lance, 1999a; Lance, 1999b; Lance, 2000). As well as sharing this formal research, each of us must work diligently to gather our own personal data and surround our students and ourselves with that evidence. We must:

Be confident;
Promote the value of our role in the teaching and learning process;
Share our talents and skills with others;
Mentor and encourage each other.

2. Treat this problem as a personal professional research project

We need to be proactive about our own learning. We must become active inquirers ourselves. If we are to help students understand, we must investigate the recent research about how students learn and adjust our strategies to take advantage of this knowledge. Find out all we can about brain-based learning, multiple intelligences, learning styles, co-operative learning, facets of understanding, performance tasks, etc. Experiment with new strategies, reflect on the experience, redesign, consult with others, rework and try again until we find techniques and strategies that best facilitate student understanding.

3. Find ways to make learning both engaging and effective

Children are innately curious. They come to school in kindergarten hard-wired to ask a lot of questions, particularly those higher level “why” questions. What happens along the way to short those circuits and dampen their “natural inquiry” approach to life? By the time many students are in middle school, they have difficulty formulating higher-level questions. By high school there is so much pressure to succeed that the only questions students ask are: “When is ‘it’ due?” “How much is ‘it’ worth?” They are so accustomed to doing “it” for the teacher that their focus tends to be on the product rather than the development of personal understanding. All the joy and excitement are gone.

Marks are of ultimate importance to the students. Assessment is undeniably critical to teachers as well. A carefully designed assessment task holds the key to improving student achievement.

The challenge is to design assessment tasks that are effective and engaging (Wiggins & McTighe, 1999), build on students’ natural curiosity and capitalize on their desire to mimic adult experiences. Tasks must engage students in authentic real world performances that give them an opportunity to develop personal meaning and utilize their talents as well as their knowledge. If the activities and learning demonstrations are engaging and effective, understanding should improve and even some of the joy and excitement should return.

4. Clarify curriculum goals

We must be very clear about what it is we want understood. For many years teacher-librarians have been witnesses and accomplices to those mega-units of study such as medieval times, whales, famous scientists and flight. Many were engaging and provided for lots of great learning. But was it the learning we wanted? Did we really know what students achieved? Just what was it we wanted them to learn while they were “doing medieval times” or “flight”?

Today all school districts have clear learning expectations and standards for student learning. It is up to us to select appropriate goals and plan effective teaching and learning experiences. Current pedagogy encourages us to begin planning with targeted learning goals for students (Wiggins & McTighe, 1999):

What is it that I want my students to know, do and understand?
How will students demonstrate that understanding? What will be acceptable evidence of their learning?
How will I construct the learning experience so that students can achieve the desired results?

5. Teach and integrate information literacy skills

We need to think about what students need to know and know how to do before they can build understanding. As well as targeted knowledge and concepts, students need to hone information literacy skills. They also need to know when and where to apply these skills. Students with a solid repertoire of information literacy skills would be better prepared to tackle their schoolwork today and their future world of work and play.

What are the attributes of information literate students? They can:
Explore their topic and define their information need;
Use a variety of information-gathering strategies;
Locate and access relevant information from a variety of sources;
Evaluate credibility of sources;
Select only the data they need from all the available sources;
Process and record selected data.
Understand form and format of information;
Analyze and synthesize information;
Share what they have learned through a variety of oral, written and multimedia presentations;
Engage in literary and media experiences;
Honor the work of others by using appropriate references and citations;
Demonstrate their learning so that others can learn from them;
Apply what they have learned to new and different situations;
Optimize the use of technology to enhance their learning;
Evaluate their own learning processes and set goals for their improvement (Koechlin & Zwaan, 2001).

6. Commit to focus on student understanding

How can we design information tasks so students can develop real understanding? Just what do we mean by “understanding” anyway? In Understanding by Design, Wiggins and McTighe tell us, “You understand it only if you can teach it, use it, prove it, explain it, or read between the lines.

This definition certainly broadens the scope of an assessment task, doesn’t it? It also confirms that authentic performance is the perfect tool for assessment of understanding

Wiggins and McTighe offer us an enlightening framework of understanding, which reinforces the importance of analysis, synthesis and transfer. They have developed in this work a multifaceted view of understanding that they have called the “Six Facets of Understanding.” In this model, when students truly understand they can:

explain;
interpret;
apply;
develop perspective;
empathize;
have self-knowledge.

This interpretation challenges us as teacher-librarians and teachers to determine how students will demonstrate the selected goals and understandings, and then design learning experiences that will equip students with the skills and knowledges needed to perform the demonstrations. The demonstration task must measure the desired learning. The learning activities and experiences must prepare the student for this demonstration.

Teacher-librarians need to develop ways to apply this knowledge about understanding to the design of good information tasks. Understanding is student-constructed. Our challenge is to help students reach understanding. In Figure 1 we have applied the work of Wiggins and McTighe to skill-building and task design in school library programs.

Commitment to any of these actions, individually, will enhance the school library program. By strategically applying these ideas we can design learning experiences that will help students to construct personal meaning and consequently understanding. When students achieve understanding they will be more successful. When we link all of these initiatives together we are building the capacity of the school library program to enhance student achievement.

Task design considerations for a focus on understanding:

Blend what is engaging with what is effective. Just because a lesson is engaging does not mean that it is necessarily effective in building understanding for students (Wiggins & McTighe, 1999).
Do more than just cover desired learning. We must deliberately design to help students uncover difficult concepts and abstract ideas. We need to target complex skills and knowledges and those that are not obvious or could potentially be misunderstood. We must help students become self-directed learners: to probe, discover and inquire (Wiggins & McTighe, 1999).
Apply the six facets of understanding to the design of student performance tasks (Wiggins & McTighe, 1999).
Help students become skilled information users. They need to develop and strategically apply information literacy skills and information technologies.
Ensure access to a wide variety of information resources in a variety of formats.
Scaffold activities to enable students to build understanding and ultimately to construct personal knowledge.
Overtly teach information processing skills so students can attain understanding and consequently improve their assessment results (Koechlin & Zwaan, 2001).
Conference with classroom teachers frequently. Keep asking those probing questions: What is working and why? What isn’t working and why?
Rethink, rework and redesign.

Avoid the angst that results when students “just don’t get it.” Teach strategically. Use the reflective prompts from the Information Task Design Process (Figure 2 and Figure 3) to assist you as you design research and inquiry tasks for students. Focus on creating activities that will help students to build knowledge and skills and ultimately reach the targeted understandings. Build into learning tasks the experiences that are crucial to developing understanding. As you are designing tasks, experiment with the Six Facets of Understanding (Figure 1) and take care to provide opportunities for students to develop and express their understanding in different ways. Design activities that require your students to process the information they source before they attempt to create a product. Honor the value of all stages of information processing by assessing each component of the process, as well as the product. Marks are powerful. Students believe it is important if it is worth being marked.

Follow this strategy so your students will meet the criteria for success; so they will be able to give you what you ask for.

Finally, collect evidence of their achievements in your library program: display them; share them at staff meetings; tell the world.

References

Haycock, K. (1992). What works: Research about teaching and learning through the school’s library resource center. Vancouver: Rockland Press

Koechlin, C., & Zwaan, S. (2001). Info tasks for successful learning: Building skills in reading, writing, and research. Markham, ON: Pembroke

Krashen, S. (1993). The power of reading: Insights from the research. Englewood, CO: Libraries Unlimited.

Lance, K. (1999a). Information empowered: The school librarian as an agent of academic achievement in Alaska [online]. Retrieved from http://www.library.state.ak.us/dev/infoemp.html

Lance, K. (1999b). Measuring up to standards: The role of school libraries & information literacy in Pennsylvania schools [online]. Retrieved July 3, 2002 from http://www.lrs.org/documents/lmcstudies/PA/pabrochure.pdf (PDF file).

Lance, K. (2000). How school librarians help kids achieve standards: The second Colorado study [online]. Retrieved from http://www.lrs.org/html/about/school_studies.html

Lance, K., & Loertscher, D. (2001). Powering achievement: School library media programs make a difference: The evidence. San Jose: Hi Willow Research & Publishing.

Ontario School Library Association. (1998). Information studies: Kindergarten to Grade 12. Toronto: OSLA. Available online at http://www.accessola.com/action/positions/info_studies/

Wiggins, G., & McTighe, J.(1999). Understanding by Design. Alexandria VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

Sandi Zwaan (left) is an educational consultant for school library -programs and resources and Carol Koechlin (right) is an Instructional Leader with the Toronto District School Board. They are award--winning authors whose work has been recognized both nationally and internationally. Carol Koechlin can be reached at koechlin@sympatico.ca, and Sandi Zwaan can be contacted at hzwaan@sympatico.ca.