What is high school supposed to do?

For class this week, I read Wiggins and McTighe's 2008 article, Put Understanding First, published in Reshaping High Schools as well as Chapter 3 of How People Learn. Both articles emphasized the need for primary and secondary education to focus on understanding and transferring content, rather than memorization of content. This follows up with some of the topics that we discussed back in the beginning of the semester, including the ideas of acquisition, making meaning, and transfer. We emphasized back then, and these articles emphasized this week, that our educational system is still heavily dependent on acquisition, to the detriment of making meaning and the abilities of students to transfer what they know. However, this time around, both articles gave concrete suggestions for how to to enhance meaning-making and transfer in the classroom.

One of the ideas that I found most intriguing was in Wiggins and McTighe's article. They discuss that students can sometimes benefit from engaging with ideas and concepts prior to having all the facts. They call this rethinking the instructional sequence, and it really is a rethinking. They are not saying to get rid of the facts altogether. Rather, they suggest having students get their feet wet in a new idea before sitting them to explain it all. Certainly, this sound more engaging than the typical educational sequence,but more than being interesting, it gives students the chance to really engage with ideas so that when they do learn facts, they have a more flexible idea of how to apply them to different situations. Some of the best teaching that I have seen, both in formal and informal learning environments, follows this idea and it would be interesting to see it applied more broadly in education.