Teaching for Understanding (TfU)

(Extracted from here)

The teachers at Victoria School show us how teachers can actively work together, forging communities of learning, to guide students beyond just mere knowledge, towards true understanding.

We are all aware that to know something is not quite the same as understanding something. After all, just because a student understands the concept of overpopulation does not mean that he also understands how this may contribute to environmental deterioration or why this could lead to the extinction of certain native plants and animals. He may know a great deal but he has failed to understand its implications - a scenario that teachers have encountered all too often in the classroom.

Added to this is also a more established awareness of the culture of isolation among teachers: a culture where a lack of shared knowledge and peer support is endemic. Simply put, teachers just don't share their skills and experiences with each other, and there is no support among the faculty. And so, teachers' capacities are often sorely constrained as a result, as they try to fight a seemingly lonely battle against unmotivated students, a relentless workload, and the heavy responsibility of shaping the next generation.

To combat both of these trends, Mrs Lee Hwa Phiak, together with the teachers at Victoria School have turned to the Teaching for Understanding (TfU) framework¹, developed by the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Teaching for Understanding
In line with the Ministry of Education's (MOE) Teach Less, Learn More focus, the TfU framework asks four main questions that teachers need to ask themselves before they even begin to teach:

1. What shall we teach?
2. What is worth understanding?
3. How shall we teach for understanding?
4. How can students and teacher know what students understand and how students can develop deeper understanding?

These questions help teachers to understand why they teach what they teach. It acknowledges teachers' true role as facilitators of understanding—they are no longer just mere providers of knowledge.

This framework also helps teachers understand how what they teach contributes to their students' understanding.

…Together
To learn how to implement the TfU framework in their own subject areas, the teaching staff completed an online professional development programme (WIDE World²). By working in small teams, they were able to try out new strategies, discuss and obtain feedback. This also helped to combat the problem of teacher isolation through extensive collaborative learning and active peer review, which provided a rich and purposeful learning experience.

This supportive process continued even after the course was completed. The teachers remained dedicated to applying the TfU framework to the curriculum, as part of their shared responsibility for their students' learning. Combining their experience and resources, they worked together on lesson plans and assessment activities. Teachers also sat in on each other's lessons and reflected upon their own as well as others' teaching practices.

The result
This greater exploration and experimentation in teaching practice, using the common language of the TfU framework, not only increased teacher motivation and morale but also student engagement in class. Lessons become more enjoyable and meaningful, and students demonstrated a positive gain in their subject performance.

Not only have the teachers at Victoria School managed to inspire greater understanding in their students, but they have also deepened their own knowledge and understanding of content and pedagogy through shared awareness and effort.

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My mentor right now is also involved in this implementation of TfU in our school and is also guiding me towards this approach of teaching where lessons are now more students learning centric rather than teacher lesson centric. The approach is really to allow students to be engaged in hands-on tasks or through real life examples that they can relate to, so as to provide an environment where they formulate their own learning and logical thinking through exploration and group discussions/experiment to share ideas as well as questions of what works and what doesn’t and provide opportunities to use what they have learnt to demonstrate their understanding, rather than traditional instructive learning. Teachers now play a role of a facilitator in student’s learning and the use of more interactive approach as well as the using of technology to help implement that is now more prevalent in the classroom.