Creating Desired Results for Understanding By John L. Brown

This is the second How-To in the series, Teaching for Understanding in the Visual and Performing Arts based on the principles of Understanding by Design by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTigue.

Understanding as a Key Element of Arts Education

As we saw in the previous article in this series exploring the Understanding by Design instructional framework, the visual and performing arts have always represented a deep commitment to teaching for understanding. The power of the arts lies, in part, in their ability to awaken us to ourselves, our connections to our world, and universal processes that both unite and divide us as human beings.

The backward design process advocated by Understanding by Design reminds us that we must begin at the beginning, starting in Stage One with clearly-articulated outcomes for student learning. In turn, Stage Two (assessment) and Stage Three (designing instructional activities) must be closely aligned with our desired results, reinforcing students' ongoing process toward mastering them.

What might Stage One of Understanding by Design look like when teaching the visual and performing arts? Three controlling ideas can help us answer that question:

1. We need to begin with our content and performance standards, determining what the standards for a particular unit or lesson suggest about what all students should know, do, and understand at the conclusion of an instructional episode or process.
2. As we "unpack" our standards, we need to organize our instructional designs conceptually by identifying enduring understandings (i.e., big statements of understanding that frame big ideas at the heart of what we are studying) and essential questions (i.e., open-ended, interpretive questions that will guide student inquiry).
3. To complete our Stage One design, we need to formulate "enabling knowledge objectives," which frame in behaviorally-measurable terms what our students are expected to know and be able to do.

Creating Enduring Understandings in the Arts

Let's begin with what enduring understandings might be like within the fields of the visual and performing arts. According to Understanding by Design authors Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe (2004, Understanding by Design Professional Development Workbook, page 115), an enduring understanding:

1. Involves the big ideas that give meaning and importance to facts.
2. Can transfer to other topics, fields, and adult life.
3. Is usually not obvious, often counterintuitive, and easily misunderstood.
4. May provide a conceptual foundation for basic skills.
5. Is deliberately framed as a generalization-the "moral of the story."

To give you a sense of how enduring understandings might operate in the visual and performing arts, here are a few examples. Consider how each of them reflects the design principles presented by Wiggins and McTighe:

1. Art is a mirror to life, reflecting artists' construction of meaning about their lives, their world, and their times.
2. Through the visual and performing arts, we can express our personal vision of the world and understand the vision of others.
3. Great artists throughout the ages have both foreshadowed and articulated the effects of social, political, cultural, and technological changes in our world.
4. Every art form has a unique language used by the artist to communicate with the world.
5. The medium through which an artist works shapes and refines his or her ways of expressing a personal vision as well as reactions to universal human experiences.

Enduring understandings can be either overarching (i.e., applicable to multiple situations and contexts) or topical (i.e., specific to a single lesson or unit). The five statements of understanding presented previously are overarching in their design since they can be applied to a variety of grade levels, content areas, and arts disciplines. In contrast, topical understandings in the arts, focusing upon more discrete topics and content emphases, might include such examples as the following:

1. Painting: The Impressionists rejected the hyper-realism of the camera in favor of experimenting with the effects of light upon the human eye.
2. Drawing: We can modify the lightness, darkness, and depth of our lines in order to enhance our use of both aerial and linear perspective.
3. Music: In order to appreciate Japanese Koto music, we need to understand its relationship to Japanese theatrical traditions and its role in Japanese culture.
4. Ballet: The five positions of the feet form a basic grammar to which the dancer always returns as she expresses herself through the movement of dance.
5. Computer Graphics: The technical side of computer graphics may form its "science," but its real power lies in our ability to create new visual worlds and populate them through our imagination.

Essential Questions: Arts and the Interrogative

If enduring understandings represent the big ideas students will revisit while studying the visual and performing arts, then essential questions represent the basis for inquiry and debate. According to Wiggins and McTighe (2004, Understanding by Design Professional Development Workbook, page 91), essential questions:

1. Have no simple "right" answer; they are meant to be argued.
2. Are designed to provoke and sustain student inquiry, while focusing learning and final performances.
3. Often address the conceptual or philosophical foundations of a discipline.
4. Raise other important questions.
5. Naturally and appropriately recur.
6. Stimulate vital, ongoing rethinking of big ideas, assumptions, and prior lessons.

Like enduring understandings, essential questions can be both overarching or topical. Here are some examples for you to consider. In your opinion, is each of the following questions "overarching" or "topical" in design?

1. How are sounds and silence organized and juxtaposed in various musical forms?
2. How do the Bobo people of Burkina Faso use masks as part of their tribal ceremonies?
3. To what extent does form follow function in the visual and performing arts?
4. Why did Braque and Picasso create cubism?
5. How can motion in dance provoke emotional and spiritual responses in the audience?

Once again, both enduring understandings and essential questions frame students' exploration of the content they study. They also function as controlling structures to guide and inform students' development of conceptual understanding. By using them to trigger inquiry, discussion, and debate, teachers of the visual and performing arts can help students to dig more deeply into the meaning of what they are doing and its universal significance.

Framing Objectives for Understanding in the Arts

The final component of Stage One "desired results" involves the formation of enabling knowledge objectives. Specifically, we can ask ourselves: Based upon the enduring understandings and essential questions students will investigate, what will they need to know and be able to do in order to sustain that investigation and develop deeper understanding in this (lesson, unit, course)?

The famous "know/do" dichotomy requires that we distinguish between two key types of knowledge: i.e., declarative and procedural. Declarative knowledge includes key facts, concepts (one-word ideas and phrases with a high level of abstraction), generalizations, rules, and principles. Essentially, this part of our curriculum is the information we want our students to understand and store in long-term memory. Examples in the visual and performing arts include:

• Dates and artists associated with abstract expressionism
• The concept of a pas de deux
• The generalization that A true artist demonstrates both technical proficiency and a deep commitment to using his or her art as a vehicle for communicating to an audience.
• The rule that based upon the conventions of aerial perspective in painting, objects in the distance are presented as lighter than objects in the foreground.
• The principle that form follows function in art.

In contrast, procedural knowledge represents the "doing" side of our curriculum. It includes the skills, procedures, and processes that students are to study and, eventually, master in order to gain proficiency and competence in such disciplines as the visual and performing arts. Examples include:

• Such discrete behaviors (i.e., skills) as modulating the lightness and darkness of a line to communicate weight and volume; assuming the third position in ballet; controlling one's breath to extend a note while singing.
• Procedures (i.e., a series of skills presented in a sequence) such as viewing an object and using shadowing to express depth; ensuring that lines associated with objects and forms in a painting converge at a vanishing point; varying body rhythm according to changing rhythms in music.
• Processes (i.e., independent applications of internalized procedures) such as students creating an original portrait; music students performing as an ensemble in a recital; students choreographing an original dance presentation.

In addition to distinguishing between declarative and procedural knowledge, the last consideration in Stage One design involves our use of the six facets of understanding. Essentially, teachers in the visual and performing arts are encouraged to frame their objectives for lessons and units using behavioral verbs that are reflective of one or more of the six "facets" identified by Wiggins and McTighe: i.e., explanation, interpretation, application, perspective, empathy, and self-knowledge.

These facets are equal in their power and, unlike the levels of Bloom's famous Taxonomy, they are not hierarchical. We will conclude our exploration of Stage One by summarizing key questions you can ask yourself about the connections of your lessons and units to one or more of the following "facets" questions:

1. Explanation: How will students be expected to support claims, conclusions, and assertions with evidence from what we are studying?
2. Interpretation: How will students be asked to construct meaning and express their conclusions through the creation of original works of art and through artistic performances?
3. Application: How will I ensure that my students move beyond formulaic modeling of the information, skills and procedures they are using toward independent understanding and original use in a creative, authentic way?
4. Perspective: How will I encourage my students to investigate, explore, and debate differing points of view associated with the topics, ideas, and processes we will study in this unit/course?
5. Empathy: How will I support my students to understand the feelings and aesthetic reactions of others? How can I encourage my students to "walk in the shoes" of others?
6. Self-Knowledge: How will my students' experiences in the visual and performing arts enhance their understanding of themselves, their aesthetic values, and their comprehension of the world in which they live?

Now that we have explored in some detail Stage One of Understanding by Design, we will move in the next article to Stage Two issues. Specifically, we will examine the role of a balanced assessment process in encouraging student learning. We will also discuss how visual and performing arts instructors can monitor students' evolving understanding and evaluate their ability to express that understanding through the arts.