Teachers and Teaching
theory and practice
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Using ‘big ideas’ to enhance teaching and student
learning
Ian Mitchell, Stephen Keast, Debra Panizzon & Judie Mitchell
To cite this article: Ian Mitchell, Stephen Keast, Debra Panizzon & Judie Mitchell (2016):
Using ‘big ideas’ to enhance teaching and student learning, Teachers and Teaching, DOI:
10.1080/13540602.2016.1218328
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13540602.2016.1218328
Published online: 19 Aug 2016.
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Date: 25 August 2016, At: 04:07
Teachers and Teaching: theory and practice, 2016
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13540602.2016.1218328
Using ‘big ideas’ to enhance teaching and student learning
Ian Mitchell, Stephen Keast, Debra Panizzon and Judie Mitchell
Education Faculty, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia
ABSTRACT
Organising teaching of a topic around a small number of ‘big ideas’
has been argued by many to be important in teaching for deep
understanding, with big ideas being able to link different activities and
to be framed in ways that provide perceived relevance and routes into
engagement. However it is our view that, at present, the significance
of big ideas in classroom practice is underappreciated while their
implementation in teaching is perceived as ‘unproblematic’. In this
paper we address these issues; while we draw on the experiences
of two major research projects focusing on teachers’ pedagogical
reasoning, we attempt to investigate big ideas from a conceptual
stance. While the domain is important, we argue that the source of
big ideas should include reflection on issues of student learning and
engagement as well as the domain. Moreover, big ideas should be
framed in ways that are richer, more generative of teaching ideas
and more pedagogically powerful than topic headings. This means
framing them as a sentence, with a verb, that provides direction and
ideas for teachers. We posit three different kinds of big ideas: big
ideas about content, big ideas about learning and big ideas about
the domain; the last two result in teachers having parallel agendas to
their content agendas. In addition to discussing how pedagogically
powerful big ideas can be constructed, we draw on data from highly
skilled teachers to extend thinking about how teachers can use big
ideas.
ARTICLE HISTORY
Received 19 January 2016
Accepted 6 June 2016
KEYWORDS
Big ideas; pedagogical
reasoning; pedagogical
purposes; metacognition
Introduction
Ninety-five years ago Whitehead (1929) argued for ‘big ideas’:
Let the main ideas which are introduced into a child’s education be few and important, and
let them be thrown into every combination possible. (p. 2)
Yet, the roots go back even further to 1902 when Dewey talked about teachers ‘psychologising’ discipline knowledge in ways that lead to big ideas, and moving away from the
traditional facts and ideas that often limit the ways in which students think about their
own learning (Smith & Girod, 2003). While Pedagogical Content Knowledge (Shulman,
1987) encapsulates the notion of big ideas, it is our view that at present the significance of
big ideas in classroom practice is underappreciated while their implementation in teaching
is perceived as ‘unproblematic’.
CONTACT Stephen Keast
Stephen.Keast@monash.edu
© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
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I. Mitchell et al.
An example of the point being made here occurred recently in the development of the
Australian Curriculum: Science, where big ideas played a central role in the initial Science
Framing Paper (Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority [ACARA],
2008) in linking scientific understandings, science inquiry skills and the processes of science
across topics and year levels. Unfortunately, the purpose and meaning of these ideas was
not clearly articulated to the educational stakeholders with a vested interest in the curriculum, resulting in a move in terminology to ‘overarching ideas’ in the final curriculum
(Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority [ACARA], 2012) because
this term was more understandable and palatable to the stakeholders. Critically though,
it is not the terminology that is the issue but rather how the ‘ideas’ are construed and the
role they play as an integrating feature in the curriculum that has changed from the initial
conceptualisation. Rather than being embedded and central to the curriculum, they are
presented in the current version as an added filter for teachers to consider in implementing
the curriculum, with the result that they are likely to be overlooked entirely. In our view,
this was a missed opportunity to support and educate science teachers in reconceptualising
their teaching in ways that enhance student learning, with a focus on connecting and linking
scientific concepts and ideas.
In this paper we explore three different types of big ideas: big ideas about content, big
ideas about the domain and big ideas about quality learning. We argue the case that big
ideas are pedagogically powerful because they offer direction and advice to teachers in
ways that enhance teaching and student learning. While we draw on the experiences of two
major research projects focusing on teachers’ pedagogical reasoning, much of this paper
goes beyond what directly emerged from these projects and we attempt to investigate big
ideas from a conceptual stance. Having introduced a context for the paper using the Science
Continuum project and the Sharing Pedagogical Purposes Group (SPPG), the notion of
big ideas and how are they are conceived in the literature is discussed. Following this, we
discuss some key issues in the generation and formulation of big ideas with a focus on big
ideas about content. We then suggest two different types of big ideas, and finally, we consider the practical aspects of big ideas and how they might be embedded into initial teacher
education. Even though the examples discussed in the paper relate to Science, we consider
that big ideas exist in other domains, such as Mathematics and History.
Context
The impetus for the paper comes largely from the work undertaken in two earlier projects
that are informing a current Australian Research Council Discovery Project explicating the
pedagogical reasoning of primary and secondary teachers in science (Shulman, 1987). In
2007 The Science Continuum project (Isaacs, Corrigan, & Mitchell, 2008) was intended to
connect teachers, from Foundation to Year 10 with research on students’ learning in science
and in particular with research on students’ alternative conceptions (e.g. Driver, Guesne, &
Tiberghien, 1985; Fensham, 1984) in 52 content areas. Big ideas were used in this project
to provide (i) purposes for activities, (ii) create real-world links for students, and (iii) help
teachers target known barriers to learning based upon research evidence. Part of this project
was a focus on two kinds of big ideas: content big ideas, and big ideas about the domain
of science. The project involved a team of University researchers who drew on both the
Teachers and Teaching: theory and practice
3
relevant research literature and their extensive experiences as teachers and leaders of groups
of teachers to develop an online resource for the Department of Education.1
The SPPG (Mitchell & Mitchell, 2011a) was a cross-faculty, primary and secondary
group of 10 teachers that emerged from the long-running Project for Enhancing Effective
Learning (PEEL) (Baird & Mitchell, 1986). As part of a long-standing agenda of enhancing
metacognition, the focus of the SPPG was for teachers to share with their students their
pedagogical reasoning, including their reasons for designing lessons in a particular way, the
big ideas being used, and the learning agendas underpinning the lessons, along with some
of the challenges they faced in their lesson planning. This group of teachers met regularly
over a five-year period with university colleagues to share and analyse their recent practice
and to further develop and refine their ideas for extending their own learning. This project
was focused on student learning rather than specific content. The constructs of big ideas
about content and about the domains, as well as how teachers could use them, evolved
from these discussions as critically important. In addition, the construct of big ideas about
learning emerged as a third sort of big idea that was central to achieving change in how
students conceived of and approached learning (Mitchell & Mitchell, 2011b).
As stated earlier, we frame this paper as a conceptual piece, not an empirical study;
however it does draw on a range of rich data from classrooms. The science continuum
project did not collect any new classroom data, rather it drew on extensive earlier work,
sometimes reinterpreting this work in the light of theoretical advances. The SPPG group
of teachers shared a great deal of classroom experience, both orally and in written cases as
they researched and developed their pedagogy.
Big ideas in the literature
Hume and Berry (2011, p. 352), when describing the process of constructing a teaching
sequence noted that ‘key ideas are full standalone statements, which give a sense of enduring
understandings that students need to develop, rather than simply noting down headings,
phrases or questions’. It is our view that it is critical to unpack what is meant by enduring
understandings if we are to fully explore the impact of big ideas on teaching and learning.
Whiteley (2012) adds to this idea stating: ‘Big ideas are the building material of understanding. They can be thought of as the meaningful patterns that enable one to connect the dots
of otherwise fragmented knowledge’ (p. 42).
An example of what we mean by this is provided by Smith and Girod (2003, p. 299) in
describing a high school geology teacher. Having watched a river erode one part of a bank
and deposit sediment a little further on, the teacher constructed the big idea that ‘there are
geological forces that destroy physical features and forces that create them’. The teacher then
used this idea to link and give real-world relevance to a wide range of geological content that
was presented in very isolated and disengaging ways in the students’ textbook. For the students, framing the big idea in this way allowed them to look at everyday phenomena in new
ways, attending to things they previously may not have focused upon in their environment.
The geological big idea maps onto our conceptualisation (we avoid the term definition
here) of a big idea being a unifying principle that connects and organises a number of smaller
ideas or concepts and multiple experiences. In other words, integrating is one role that makes
big ideas pedagogically powerful in that they offer direction for teachers to make learning
for students more connected.
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I. Mitchell et al.
Another key role of big ideas was identified by Shulman when interviewed at the
American Educational Research Association conference in 2007 (Berry, Loughran, & Van
Driel, 2008). During this interview he stated that ‘The test of an idea isn’t whether it’s true,
it’s whether it is generative’ (p. 1274). This notion was discussed by Perkins (1992) who
referred to generative topics, which are close to what we consider encapsulates a big idea.
Perkins argued that generative topics helped teachers rethink what they were teaching from
different perspectives. He also listed three criteria consistent with generative topics: (i) centrality to the discipline; (ii) richness of linking; and (iii) accessibility to students. Big ideas
should be central to the discipline, of course, but statements from the domain as provided
in textbooks often do not meet Perkins’ criteria, whereas the geology example discussed
above actually addresses all three of these criteria. We agree with Perkins’ three criteria for
being generative, but would add a fourth: big ideas should be suggestive by offering teachers ways into a topic with emphases on the explanations, and possible teaching activities.
In the following sections of this paper, these initial ideas are discussed in greater detail
with reference to examples from the literature and our work with teachers in the research
projects framing the context of this paper. As noted earlier, we begin by focusing on big
ideas about content.
Evolving issues in the generation and formulation of big ideas
The authors have been thinking about big ideas for over ten years. During that time, our
thinking has evolved and sharpened as we identified a succession of key issues relating to
big ideas. The discussion that follows is organised, as far as is feasible, in a flow that reflects
how our thinking has evolved.
Where do big ideas come from?
In the geology example above, it is the teacher’s actual lived experience and then his ponderings as he grappled with notions of student engagement and perceived relevance. However,
a more common source of big ideas for teachers is the domain itself where topic headings in
a curriculum or chapter titles in a textbook emphasise the main ideas considered important
in the domain. We do not regard topic headings as big ideas because they are not sufficiently
generative. For example, Morgan (2012), suggests a big idea in mathematics is mathematical thinking (p. 49) while Alvarado, Canada, Garritzc, and Melladob (2015, p. 610) suggest
that pH/relative strength of acids and bases (p. 610) is a big idea. While these are important
content headings, we argue that they are not generative and do not have value in linking to
other ideas or to students’ experiences. For this reason they are not pedagogically powerful
in this form and do not translate the pedagogical reasoning on which they are based.
Another issue is that these statements from the domain are often the end products of
many long-term discussions and possible arguments within the community of scholars
as the knowledge and understanding of the discipline is socially constructed. Over a long
period of time, the phrasing of such statements becomes more succinct, with the intention
of describing complex phenomena in the real world. The problem though, is that these
descriptions, while eloquent, are not phrased in ways intended to make them useful for
teaching and so often need reworking if they are to enhance learning for students.
Teachers and Teaching: theory and practice
5
One example of this is the well-known statement of Newton’s third law To every action
there is an equal and opposite reaction. This phrasing has proved to be misleading as it
directs attention away from the crucial issue that the action and reaction forces are acting
on two different objects. Teachers, and text books, often draw two arrows on the same object
representing an action–reaction pair making pedagogically useful explanations impossible. Phrasing the big idea as Almost all reaction forces are due to some distortion (bending,
squashing, stretching) of an object, shifts the focus to the cause of reaction forces and offers
direction for where to place them on a diagram. In a similar way, the statement mosquitos
have become resistant to DDT suggests that individual mosquitos can develop resistance due
to spraying, which is a serious error – populations develop resistance because the non-resistant
mosquitos die and do not breed. In both these examples, the rephrased big idea is sensitive to
known problems of learning and is thus more pedagogically generative, pointing teachers in
more fruitful directions for all aspects of their teaching. We note that both of these examples,
like a great majority of what was developed in the Science Continuum project came from
first-hand (actual classroom teaching) or second-hand (working with teacher researchers)
classroom experiences where using pedagogies suggested by these big ideas consistently
produced higher levels of student affective and cognitive engagement. A teaching sequence
involving the first example is detailed in Gunstone and Mitchell (1998).
We argue that teachers should not uncritically accept key words and phrases from the
domain as big ideas, but rework these into statements that are generative. This was the experience of the SPPG when teachers initially drew on what they perceived as big ideas from the
domain in ways that were inadequate to help them teach the topic. An example to illustrate
this point was the first attempt made by some of the science teachers to generate big ideas.
One teacher proposed that the definitions of a heterotroph and autotroph2 were big ideas.
The issue here is not that there was no big idea involved, but the way in which the idea was
framed. The definitions give little or no insight as to why this idea matters scientifically. The
big idea here is that one group of living organisms use the Sun’s energy to make food that all
other living things depend on for energy and therefore their existence. Phrased or conceived
in this way, this big idea helps to organise many key concepts of biology and environmental
science. For example, it explains why vegetable beds need direct sunlight; why food chains
always begin with an organism that photosynthesises and thus why phytoplankton (not
noticed by children) are the starting point for almost all marine life. It is a central idea in
order to explain why there is a 90% drop in biomass at each food chain level and thus why
substances such as DDT bioaccumulate tenfold at each level, with fatal consequences for
apex predators such as eagles. It also provides a route to student interest when looking
at exceptions such as bacteria that live near undersea volcanoes with their energy source
coming from chemistry powered by the heat of the Earth’s core. Whether or not the teacher
introduces the technical labels for these two groups is not of central importance here.
Big ideas need to be phrased as a sentence
Woolnough (personal communication, July 2, 2014), in working with pre-service teachers to
develop big ideas using Loughran, Berry, and Mulhall’s (2006) notions on PCK, (Woolnough,
2008) found that big ideas were best phrased as a sentence with a verb. Hasweh’s work
(2005) resonates with Woolnough’s conception. He argued that pedagogical constructions
(which he claims are a better way of thinking about PCK) are often stored by teachers as a
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I. Mitchell et al.
narrative – usually expressed as sentences. He also noted that these constructions drew on
the teacher’s repeated experiences, such as understanding student alternative conceptions.
However, Hasweh did not go beyond domain statements in his analyses even though, from
our perspective, some of the teachers in his study generated pedagogically powerful big
ideas that explained and informed teaching practices. For example:
BA [teacher], when planning to teach respiration and photosynthesis, started by providing the
larger scientific framework: how building complex molecules requires energy while breakingup complex ones releases energy, and how energy is needed for vital cellular processes.
Within this framework, BA showed that every cell needs to provide energy for these cellular
processes or ‘it’s dead meat’. Respiration, she explained, was the mechanism for providing this
energy. (p. 287)
The sentence in bold (our emphasis) in this quote provided a way into explaining some
difficult scientific content and also allowed BA (the teacher) to link several different biochemical processes. Hence, BA had constructed a big idea to guide her practice that was
generative in that it offered links to other ideas.
Framing big ideas is not simple
Our experience shows that if big ideas are to be framed differently and not merely extricated from curriculum documents, textbooks or even research papers, then teachers need
to be supported in developing these big ideas. We assert that teachers engaged in skilled
pedagogical reasoning (Shulman, 1987, p. 12) can produce and use such ideas in a way
that supports Whitehead’s notion of planning teaching around a ‘few important ideas’, but
that it is difficult.
One datum from the Science Continuum project was that constructing big ideas was
often a major intellectual endeavour. Although the team had very extensive content and
pedagogical content knowledge, they were surprised at the amount of rethinking and new
thinking they had to undertake.
… the framing of the scientific view and the construction and framing of the critical teaching
ideas … involved us in very fundamental thinking about exactly why what we were suggesting was important to teach as well as the precise nature of the relevant science. (Isaacs et al.,
2008, p. 7)
Hsu, Kysh, Ramage, and Resek (2007) describe the difficulties of working with teachers to
generate big ideas in mathematics. They tried to get the teachers to think of ‘root ideas …
which generate other ideas’ (p. 330). From our perspective, their root ideas were just topic
headings, such as rules for manipulating algebraic statements. What is interesting, however, is
that for much of a year the teachers simply did not understand what the researchers meant
– this sort of thinking was foreign to them. For many teachers thinking about and using
big ideas is new and as such teachers need to recognise the advantages for their teaching
and the outcomes for their students by investing time and energy.
The SPPG also found that deciding on pedagogically powerful big ideas about content
and how to phrase these for students is a complex and multifaceted undertaking. Two
teachers from the SPPG reported how they initiated discussion with a group of teachers in
their school who were all involved in teaching a cross-domain unit (titled ‘Communities’)
across the year level. These discussions revealed an alarming range of views among the
teachers about what they were actually teaching and why. The teachers realised that there
Teachers and Teaching: theory and practice
7
was little or no shared commonality around what they were doing. These data are consistent
with Ritchhart’s (1999) comment that ‘… two teachers working from the same syllabus can
teach radically different content depending on the emphasis, context and applications that
they give each topic’ (p. 462).
Loughran et al. (2006) completed substantive work around big ideas working with
expert and experienced teachers of science to develop a scaffolding tool called Content
Representations (CoRes). These were used to help teachers conceptualise key ideas and
articulate their PCK. Teachers were asked to think about what they considered to be the big
ideas associated with teaching a given topic. These ideas were then interrogated against a
list of prompts, such as Why is it important for students to know this? (Loughran et al., 2006,
p. 22). As this research proceeded they distinguished between what they called important
science ideas and important science teaching ideas. Importantly, they found the latter were
generated as sentences and were more pedagogically powerful. For example: There is empty
space between particles focuses teachers and students towards a major barrier to learning
the particle theory of matter. A common alternative conception for students is that there is
air between the particles. Approaching the topic in this way allowed teachers to focus on
known causes of student concerns and build pedagogically powerful episodes for students.
This work is the only research we found where the researchers seem to have looked in any
detail about how teachers might generate big ideas as we have framed them. While CoRes
have been used extensively in research on PCK, the notion of teachers generating pedagogically powerful big ideas seems to have been lost, with the big ideas coming straight from
the domain, often with the sorts of problems discussed earlier.
There is a dilemma here that needs further research; there is strong value in teachers
constructing or reworking the big ideas they are going to teach, but this is rendered much
more difficult if the teachers do not have reasonably strong content and pedagogical content knowledge. Developing big ideas is intellectually demanding and time-consuming
for teachers, at least initially and they need to be able to see the value in creating them to
commit to doing it. More work is needed in this area.
Big ideas can be a route to engagement
Papert (2000) argued that ‘when ideas go to school they lose their power’ and are ‘deformed’
(p. 723); they become disconnected from how they were developed and why they were exciting, in ways that make them unattractive as routes to student engagement. He provides as
an example the idea of rules for manipulating numbers in mathematics as being historically
a very important and powerful idea, but that no child would ever suspect that from the way
in which it is presented in school as a set of boring algorithms.
We have multiple examples of teachers framing big ideas to generate engagement in
topics where this is known to be a problem. The first row in Table 1 provides one example
that had a spectacular success in the classroom. Another example was a history teacher in
the SPPG, who felt the textbook presentation of the (Australian) Gold Rush was boring;
in response, she constructed the big idea, the gold rush has left multiple legacies – social,
political and economic, in Australia today. This provided relevance to the students’ current
lives, and (as one of several positive outcomes) led to students bringing in media items that
they felt reflected a gold rush legacy, such as items about trade unions.
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Table 1. Things teachers were doing with big ideas.
Type of use
Planning
Use of big ideas
Provide a need to know/source
of engagement
Provide reasons for studying the
domain
Allow teachers to interrogate
activities to see whether and
how they link to the big ideas
Design activities and assessment targeted at big idea
Promote aspects
of quality
learning
Promote
metacognitive
reflection
Share some
intellectual
control with
students
Construct introductions and
explanations better targeted
to issues of student learning
Provide purposes for activities
that are explicitly discussed
with students
Provide reasons for tools of
the domain and hence equip
students to use them better
Link different activities, Students
commonly see each activity as
a discrete, isolated event, particularly if they are different
types of activities
Provide frames for analysis,
discussion and metacognitive
reflection
Asking students to talk in terms
of big ideas when responding
to the question of Why did we
do this?
Asking students to bring in
relevant real-life examples or
applications of a big idea
Students use big ideas to frame
questions that will extend/
direct what is done. These may
be placed on a wonder wall
Elaboration
A unit called Who makes the decisions had a big idea that there
are (different) ethical parameters in the daily work of a range of
people who do science and the compelling ethical dilemmas the
teachers presented were riveting for their students
The unit on decision-making in science included the big idea
that science is all around us in the ways people work as well as
in the decisions we need to make; both provided the teachers
with arguments for studying science
This has caused some activities to be dropped and others to be
amended. Thinking about BIs has for allowed more purposeful
and less threatening interrogation of existing practice
The BI Not all bacteria are harmful, for example, points teachers
towards looking for and using phenomena such as yoghurt
and compost bins
The BI changes in speed are always continuous will clearly change
how teachers unpack phenomena such as accelerating a toy
car from rest
This moves away from doing an activity because it is on the next
page of the text book
A big idea used by an English teacher was the role of punctuation
marks is to separate ideas. This shifted the use of different punctuation marks away from following a set of rules to decisions
based on a richer understanding of what they are doing in
structuring a piece of writing
This may be done with a short debrief, but some teachers asked
students to build up an ongoing map of big ideas and where
they were relevant. As a unit progressed, the class built an
artefact (on a smart board or wall) that they added to with any
of activities, new thoughts and new artefacts
A history teacher teaching about ‘The age of terror’ framed a
big idea that any historical document (including current videos
on terrorism) was written/made by someone with a perspective
and bias – whose history is it? This was regularly used as one
frame for asking her students, at the end of a lesson, ‘Whose
perspective were we looking at?’
This included asking students to identify which of the big ideas
for the unit were relevant
One example would be students bringing in examples where
bacteria are helpful
This is a little different from having a wonder wall around a topic
like Dinosaurs or Vikings – the prompt here is a big idea that
is intended to get students thinking about what they need or
would like to know. For example, the big idea Not all bacteria
are harmful, given that a common student view is that they are,
will generate a potentially more focused set of questions than
a prompt such as ‘bacteria.’
Big ideas can be directed at known problems of learning
As introduced earlier, the aim of the Science Continuum project was to develop a curriculum resource by a team of science education researchers and educators that would
provide teachers and students with a pathway from alternative conceptions to more accurate scientific conceptions using big ideas as a central focus. These ideas were framed by
the team in ways that were sensitive to issues of learning and to the concepts conceived
as important to the domain of science. As such, they were developed by not just thinking
Teachers and Teaching: theory and practice
9
about the domain knowledge, but also about issues of students constructing meaning for
that knowledge. The findings from this project reinforced the pedagogical power of big
ideas in linking, being generative and providing a route into student engagement. However,
they also revealed a further role that emerged around the use of big ideas, that is to help
teachers target known barriers to learning. The following is an example of the thinking
likely for Year 5 or 6 students:
A gas is matter:
A common belief, encouraged by the invisibility of gases, is they are weightless and do not
occupy space. Confusion can originate when students are regularly told that containers and
jars with nothing in them are empty, but are then expected to grasp that although empty, they
really contain air.
Reflecting on this problem of student learning resulted in the development of a big idea
that gases are a form of matter like solids and liquids. This point is taken as obvious by textbook writers who typically begin by listing solids, liquids and gases as the three states of
matter. We argue that the big idea above is what Shulman (1987) called generative in that
for teachers it suggests new activities and different emphases in explanations that address
the notion that gases occupy space and have mass. It also provides teachers with different
sensitivities to the constructed meanings behind things students may say, e.g. the jar is
empty. This is an example of identifying new ideas that the domain is silent about, yet are
central to effective learning. We would also say that (with hindsight) the big idea here helps
teachers think about and better understand what Ritchhart called ‘the “essence” of what
they are teaching’ (p. 462).
Big ideas should be formulated in ways that reflect the teacher’s pedagogical
purposes
As discussed earlier, Woolnough extended our thinking on big ideas by suggesting
that they should be phrased as a sentence with a verb that makes a statement about the
content. A subsequent analysis of the 215 ideas in the Science Continuum, showed that
they were all sentences with verbs, although this concept had not been discussed when
framing the content. This analysis also showed that they could all be mapped onto one
or more of five pedagogical purposes, and led us to our current position that big ideas
should be framed to reflect one or more pedagogical purposes.
Table 2 uses four examples of big ideas to illustrate these five purposes.
Big ideas in columns 1, 4 and 5 reflect the purposes of linking and of providing
relevance. Alternatively, the big idea in column 2 reflects the purpose of restructuring
the prior views most students have formed from their experiences. The example (in row
3) is framed to provide relevance and to tackle an alternative conception that, because
students have so many personal experiences of an apparent forward force, is typically
very strongly held. This big idea points teachers in the direction of designing activities
that will elicit reflection and generate discussion and cognitive restructuring.
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Table 2. Purposes of big ideas.
Purposes of big ideas
2. Providing the
basis for restructuring existing ideas
1. Introducing and
Focus idea organising content
Forces
Some objects expewithout
rience forces from
contact
things that are not
touching them.
(this links magnetic,
electrostatic and
gravitational forces)
The struc- Volcanoes and earthture of the quakes are largely
Earth
the consequence
of plate movement
and often occur at
the edges of these
plates
Forces on
passengers
3. An idea about
the domain, not
content
4. Connecting
the topic to
their experiences
Some objects
experience
forces from
things that are
not touching
them
Plate tectonics
is a very good
example of a ‘big’
scientific idea that
is useful because
it explains so
many Earth-related phenomena
When a car brakes,
the car slows down
but any unrestrained passenger
or object in the car
does not. (Students
think the passengers
are pushed forward
by a new forward
force)
When a car
brakes, the
car slows
down, but any
unrestrained
passenger or
object in the car
does not
5. Providing
relevance or
importance
Volcanoes and
earthquakes
are largely the
consequence
of plate movement and often
occur at the
edges of these
plates
Other types of big ideas
Big ideas about the domain
So far, we have focused on big ideas about content as this is often the first focus for teachers,
and we now discuss a second type of big idea – big ideas about the domain.
A search in the literature found some statements framed as big ideas about the nature
of the domain of Science, such as ‘the scientific method’ or ‘hypotheses’, which we would
not regard as pedagogically powerful big ideas. We would frame a big idea about scientific
method such as: There is no single scientific method and many important discoveries have been
made without a neatly designed experiment that maps onto aim, method, results, conclusion.
In this we have a view of the domain (of Science) that raises the notion of teachers having
an agenda about the nature of science that runs parallel to their content agenda (see Table 2,
column 3). One could argue that this should be considered as part of the content agenda –
that part of teaching science is teaching about the nature of science. However, we find it more
useful to consider this to be a parallel agenda because curricula do not suggest that, having
finished a unit on micro-organisms, a teacher sets out to complete a unit on the nature of
science. Rather, when thinking about each unit and lesson, teachers consider if and how it
could bring out one or more big ideas about the domain. In the case of micro-organisms,
for example, a teacher could use the case of Edward Jenner and vaccination for smallpox to
Teachers and Teaching: theory and practice
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bring out several aspects of the nature of science and the impacts of science on human kind.
It is this type of integrated approach that is endorsed in the Australian Curriculum: Science.
We argue that teachers of science (and other domains) should build an explicit agenda,
parallel to their content agenda of what they think is important and engaging to teach
about the nature of the domain, big ideas about the domain that are generative for teachers and accessible to students are central to this. We note that this is an emphasis in many
History curricula where ideas such as History is often written by the winners, are considered
important.
Big ideas about quality learning
As part of their strategy for enhancing metacognition, the SPPG group developed a third
kind of big idea – big ideas about the nature of quality learning. One example is building
understanding that classroom tasks should always be linked to the relevant big ideas and key
skills – the words in bold represent the big idea about learning that was shared with students.
A problem this addresses is that most students complete tasks mindlessly, without any
understanding that there might be a big idea that links tasks. Another example is teaching
students to rethink the roles of teacher and student. The big idea here would be that both
students and teachers understand that, and how, the roles of teachers and students change in
classrooms that focus on quality learning. It involves changes in student behaviours such as
taking more responsibility for their own learning and using the teacher as a resource and
facilitator rather than as the source of all knowledge.
Interestingly, the construct of metacognition does not seem to have been incorporated
into the literature on big ideas. It seems to be seen as unproblematic that the teacher will be
able to foreground big ideas in ways that will enhance student learning. However, this is not
simple. One important aspect of building metacognition with respect to big ideas is when
teachers talk with their students about the big ideas and their use of classroom activities in
terms of these. Sharing in this way allows students to understand how activities build on
each other and develop the big idea. We have found that this is often new and enlightening
for students and gives important insight into what the teachers in the SPPG referred to as
‘secret teachers’ business’. Such a journey of change begins with students coming to recognise that: (i) teachers have big ideas that drive their planning and teaching; and (ii) every
classroom activity has one or more purposes that can be discussed in terms of these big
ideas (which provides a useful challenge for the teachers to ensure that this is the case). The
SPPG teachers regularly and explicitly discussed big ideas about learning with their students.
This notion also adds another use of content big ideas to those discussed so far – the
notion of using big ideas to provide purpose (as well as coherence) for what is done in
class. This use is predicated on the finding that students very rarely think about the purpose
of activities and their learning is significantly diminished as a result. Part of this issue is
learning how to identify purposes and the discussion above about teachers sharing their
pedagogical purposes describes how these teachers set out to tackle it.
Getting students to think in this way meant they had to see value in the process. To partially address this aspect, the SPPG teachers codified a list of things that they were doing,
and asking their students to do, around big ideas. Table 1 represents the ways these teachers
used big ideas in the classroom; this table is a list of things the teachers reported as being
successful that they developed and tested in the classroom.
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I. Mitchell et al.
This list highlights another aspect that seems to be seen as unproblematic in the literature – what do teachers actually do with big ideas? Apart from providing advice for how to
use big ideas more effectively, this list also aids in the framing of big ideas – thinking about
what you are going to do with students can influence how big ideas are written. The range of
things in this list provides evidence that the teachers’ big ideas were commonly generative
for their pedagogical reasoning. As mentioned, we have not set out to write an empirical
paper, but the SPPG teachers shared rich data of classroom success – without this success
this voluntary, unpaid group would not have persisted for so many years. There is annotated
video footage from three of the classrooms on the PEEL website www.peelweb.org.
Big ideas in other domains
The fact that the Science Continuum project was Science based means that most of our
examples come from that domain. However, the SPPG was cross-faculty (as some of the
examples in Table 1 reflect) and these teachers had much to say about their use of big ideas
in other domains. Nevertheless, there do appear to be some domain-specific differences that
we do not discuss in detail for reasons of space and which need further research. Subjects
such as English and mathematics have a greater focus on key skills than Science and the
SPPG included key skills as a fourth kind of big idea. Sieman, Bleckly, and Neal (2012)
looked in detail at big ideas in mathematics; like us, they criticised labelling topic headings
as big ideas as (using our words) they were not generative for teachers. They identified a
small number of what they labelled big ideas about how and why mathematics works that,
they argued, underlie and give meaning to the algorithms taught in classrooms. ‘Place value’
was elaborated as Capacity to recognise and work with place-value units and view larger
numbers as counts of these units rather than collections of ones (e.g. able to count forwards
and backwards in place-value units). Collectively, we would see their ideas and their detailed
elaboration as offering teachers multiple ideas for pedagogically powerful teaching; they
were not, however, framed as sentences that reflect purposes.
Primary teachers in the SPPG group also found the construct useful, but data from the
ARC project mentioned at the outset indicates that, at least in some situations, primary
teachers frame big ideas in ways that reflect the broader range of agendas that they are coping
with in their teaching. For example, under the topic of ‘Place’, the teachers in one school
framed what they labelled a ‘throughline’; We all have a place in Australia and Australia
has a place in the world, which we would call a big idea intended to build coherence across
a range of subjects.
Some implications for teacher education
The suggestions that follow will clearly play out differently with experienced and pre-service
teachers as the latter will have far less of the experienced-based PCK that is valuable in constructing big ideas. There are a number of possible implications for teacher education; these
include building meaning for the nature of generative and pedagogically powerful big ideas,
learning to use big ideas, and developing skills around constructing big ideas of different
types. Clearly, these aspects interact with each other and cannot be dealt with in isolation.
For example, teachers could be provided with a big idea that is pedagogically powerful and
set the task of using it to interrogate and improve existing activities they might normally use
Teachers and Teaching: theory and practice
13
in teaching the concept. They could also generate consequential implications and subsequent
activities for teaching that could improve student understanding. Alternatively, pre-service
teachers could be given the details of several different looking activities for the same general
topic and be asked to construct a big idea that is relevant to all tasks. In this way, participants
gain the notion that big ideas are useful for linking concepts and activities across lessons.
Another possibility is to develop and use big ideas about the nature of the domain. For
example in science, one could select a content topic and provide pre-service teachers with
one or two relevant stories from either the history of science or from science operating in
the community. Teachers could be given the task of generating a small number of big ideas
about the nature of science suggested by the stories. Subsequently, they could decide how
these ideas and stories could be woven into the teaching of the content. Generating big ideas
about the domain and learning offer ways of broadening the use of CoRes for both teachers
and pre-service teachers. The experiences of the Science Continuum and SPPG projects
support accounts in the literature that it takes some time to develop generative big ideas
about content. Hence, activities that ask teachers, and particularly pre-service teachers to
do this, need to be developmental and to scaffold their understanding of big idea in ways
that promote the iterative nature of this process.
Concluding comments
We argue for framing big ideas about content in ways that are richer, more generative, offer
links between content ideas, and are more pedagogically powerful than topic headings.
Constructing these is neither quick nor simple, but worthwhile for teachers in explicating
their purposes and more easily making these available to students. The process involves
teachers interrogating the content, and past practices in teaching this content, then imagining and devising possible activities that offer relevance, student engagement and overcoming
barriers to learning. We reported earlier that Woolnough suggested that big ideas are best
framed as a sentence that includes a verb that makes a statement about the content. We
extend and synthesise these ideas by proposing that teachers can interrogate their practice
when they are involved in turning noun phrases about content (e.g. bacteria and micro-organisms) into verb phrases (e.g. not all bacteria are harmful). The verb phrase emerged
in this case by interrogating practice against a known problem of learning. We argue that
expressing big ideas as sentences that reflect one or more of the purposes of big ideas helps
in both their construction and use.
Furthermore, it is important to think about how teachers can use big ideas and to broaden
the range of possibilities. In this paper, we posit three different kinds of big ideas: big ideas
about content, big ideas about the domain, and big ideas about learning. We also suggest
that big ideas about learning and the domain result in teachers having parallel agendas to
their content agenda. In order for big ideas to be pedagogically powerful, it is helpful to
construct them against ideas about the nature of quality learning and student metacognition.
A focus on learning provides ideas and directions for how big ideas can be used.
Big ideas can help teaching in multiple ways; they can clarify whether and why pieces of
content should be taught, help target known barriers to learning and hence improve both
lesson and unit planning. They help teachers to integrate parallel agendas of content, of
the nature of the domain and promoting quality learning. Big ideas can also help students
and student learning in several ways: they help students link and see purposes in classroom
14
I. Mitchell et al.
activities; they can help them construct understandings that are more coherent and richly
linked; and both of these then help students monitor their learning and construct questions
to both clarify and extend their understandings.
Notes
1. This resource is available at http://www.education.vic.gov.au/school/teachers/teaching
resources/discipline/science/continuum/Pages/default.aspx.
2. heterotroph n. An organism that cannot synthesise its own food and is dependent on complex
organic substances for nutrition. autotroph. n. An organism capable of synthesising its own
food from inorganic substances, using light or chemical energy (Wikipedia).
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributors
Ian Mitchell is currently an adjunct researcher at Monash University. Mitchell research has focused
on teaching for quality learning, understanding learning and extensive work over 30 years on the
Project of Enhancing Effective Learning (PEEL).
Stephen Keast is currently a senior lecturer at Monash University. Keast’s research interests include
teacher learning, preservice teacher learning through Slowmation and preservice science teacher
education.
Debra Panizzon is currently an associate professor at Monash University. Panizzon has researched
in science teacher education and science education, in areas including assessment, rural students
and teachers, and teacher learning.
Judie Mitchell is currently an adjuct researcher at Monash University. Mitchell has researched literacy
education, teacher professional learning and student learning through PEEL.
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