What are Big Ideas?
Teaching for Understanding
Making our courses more effective
This is a message from your system AER
committee…
Please don’t shoot the messenger!
Do you feel confused by all of the AER
terms and concepts?
AER Terms Prezi
https://prezi.com/secure/024d4167a7bb4c89ecde2198f8e6f14f1be4bf58/
Trying to make sense of it all
Now you can be stressed!
What are the Learning Goals
Today?
•
•
•
•
To define Big Ideas & Essential Questions
To see where the concepts came from
To determine why they are important
To pick up some hints on how to extract the Big
Ideas and develop Essential Questions from
curriculum
• To prepare for a session later where you will
work on developing Big Ideas and Essential
Questions for a course you teach
• To develop a set of Anchor posters for your
classes on these topics
Where do these terms come from?
• Understanding by design by McTighe and
Wiggins “UbD”
• Developers of the concept of Design Down or
Backward design for curriculum development
Principles of
Understanding by Design
• Planning is best done “backward” from the
desired results
• “plan with the end in mind”
• Expectations are transformed into targets
based upon “big ideas,” essential
questions and transfer tasks
U by D demands a shift in focus
• From:
– Teach for content
mastery
– Discrete skills or facts
out of context
– “Linear” superficial
coverage
– Text as Curriculum
• To:
– Help students learn to use
content and understand
– Draw on skills in realistic
contexts & authentic tasks
– A curriculum based upon
reoccurring “big ideas”
and core tasks
– Text as a resource in
support of learning goals
How does it fit?
• Three stages of Backward Design
Stage 1: Identify Desired Results
Expectations to Big Ideas to Essential Questions to Skills and
Knowledge needed to achieve this
Stage 2: Determine Acceptable Evidence
“Begin with the end in mind”
Think about what Core Tasks; Performance Tasks or
demonstrations of learning will provide valid evidence
of a student’s ability to achieve the desired results
Stage 3: Plan Learning Experiences
Plan lessons in a structured way under the umbrella
of essential questions.
Why is this important?
• Curriculum design requires us to make choices
about what is essential NOW to help our
learners in the future.
• Learning not tied to real-world experiences is
soon forgotten.
• You must try to “hit the proverbial nerve” of your
students to promote real learning
• Without transparent and important priorities stated as performance, not content - neither
teacher nor student can be effective
What is a Big Idea?
• A big idea offers a conceptual framework
allowing the learner to explore answers to the
essential questions involving a unit of study.
-Grant Wiggins
• Answer questions like:
– Why exactly are we teaching…?
– What couldn’t people do if they didn’t understand…?
– What do we want students to understand and be able
to do 5 years from now?
I feel bad because I was always
telling him to think big.
You want them to see what you
see!
But…
• “What is big to the teacher or the expert in the
field is often abstract, lifeless, confusing, or
irrelevant to the student. What may be a vital
conception to the expert in the field of study may
well seem nonsensical, unintelligible, or of little
interest to the novice.” p. 75 UbD
• “The challenge of teaching for understanding is
largely the challenge of making the big ideas in
the field become big in the mind of the learner.”
p. 75 UbD
What is an enduring
understanding?
• One or more Big Ideas framed as an
understanding!!!! (in a sentence)
• A Big Idea is developed by the lessons
that organize the learning of the skills and
knowledge that allow students to uncover
its meaning by answering essential
questions.
• It is an on-going process!
How does it fit?
1. Curriculum Documents
-unpacking the Overall and Specific Expectations
2. Big Ideas & Enduring Understandings
-Makes you think of Core Tasks (Performance Tasks) &
Assessments
3. Essential Questions
4. Lesson Learning Goals & Development
Clarifying Content Priorities
• Content that is worth being familiar with
• Content that is important to know and do
• “Big Ideas”
Unpacking the curriculum
Standard (we call them expectations)
Students will compare and contrast (purposes, sources of power) various forms of government in the world
(e.g., monarchy, democracy, republic, dictatorship) and evaluate how effective they have been in
establishing order, providing security and accomplishing common goals.
Verbs (How students will show what is required)
Compare
Contrast
Evaluate
Nouns (What students are required to know)
Forms of Government:
Monarchy
Democracy
Republic
Dictatorship
Order
Security
Common goals
Examples of abstract curricula
• The earth does not appear to move to human observers
• There are no obvious signs of our being descended from
primates
• It seems bizarre that the founding fathers of the U.S.
democratic system kept slaves
• The text of Hamlet seems to have nothing to do with
adolescent angst and depression
• Derivatives and integrals make no conceptual sense to
the novice calculus student
• The facts found on Wikipedia are less credible than facts
found in academic journals
Revealing the Big Ideas
Big ideas are revealed, not identified, through…
• Focusing themes or concepts
• On-going debate
• Insightful perspectives
• Finding underlying assumptions
• Paradoxes, problems, challenges
• Organizing theories
• Overarching principles
• Provocative questions
• Processes in the field; problem-solving, decision-making
• By identifying the nouns and verbs in the standards or
overall expectations.
What is the difference?
• Expectations: written from the point of view of “all students will…”
• Big Ideas: Stated concisely
“all forms of measurement contain errors”
• Essential Questions:
– Stated as questions in a way that provides an umbrella for learning a
host of skills and knowledge
– Engaging and real for students (in words students can understand)
– “How does the use of measuring devices introduce error into
measurement?”
• Learning Goals:
– Written as performance statements with reference to Big Ideas and
Essential questions and refer to the actual goals of lessons designed to
help students answer the essential questions (should be explicit in
every lesson)
– E.g. “Today’s learning goal is to perform an activity using several
measuring devices in order for students to learn the type and degree of
errors involved in each device.”
Why are Big Ideas important?
• Student engagement increases
– Curriculum ties to other courses and life
– Authentic tasks make it real
– Students know the reason why they are doing each
lesson as it fits into the big picture of the
– Essential Questions are generated from Big Ideas
and form the basis for our lessons and student
learning by linking knowledge and skills to a greater
purpose and creating deeper understanding.
– Essential questions are worded in language students
can understand
• Deeper understanding allows students to
transfer knowledge and skills to meet new
challenges.
Criteria…Types of Big Ideas
1. Concepts…economics…”supply & demand”
2. Themes…good triumphs over evil
3. Debates…a winning team is one where
offence beats defence; conservative vs. liberal
4. Perspective…the glass is half full or half empty
5. Paradox…freedom involves responsibility;
poverty amid plenty
6. Theory…form follows function
7. Principle…less is more
8. Assumption…non-fiction text always depicts
truth; markets are rational
9. Authentic problems…voter apathy
Big Idea checklist…
1. Does it have many layers not obvious to
the inexperienced learner? Is it an
“Umbrella term”
2. Does one have to dig deep to truly
understand its meaning or implications?
3. Is it prone to disagreement?
4. Might it change over time?
5. Does it go to the core of the curriculum?
Is it historically important yet, still alive in
the field for debate?
Big Idea checklist continued…
6. Is it transferable to new situations and
learnings a student will meet in the
future?
7. Is it abstract, not obvious?
8. Is it counterintuitive?
9. Is it prone to misconception?
10. Does it allow students to ask and re-ask
questions to clarify and uncover the idea
as they go through the course?
What a Big Idea is not…
•
•
•
•
A question
A concept or piece of knowledge
A narrow concept
Written as an objective/expectation of
students
• An activity (e.g. can sort French words into
lists of nouns and verbs)
• A skill – can light a Bunsen burner
What are essential questions?
• Questions based on Big Ideas that frame
learning goals of a course. (May have several
for a Big Idea).
• They are not answerable with finality in a brief
sentence
• They stimulate on-going thought as new
experiences help clarify them for learners.
• They provide focus for the Big Ideas throughout
a course using language that is understandable
by students
Essentials of essential questions
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
Cause genuine and relevant inquiry
Broad in scope, and provoke deep thought, lively
discussion, inquiry, and more questions; never fully
answered
Pose authentic dilemmas
Force incongruities into our attention
Require students to consider alternative views, weigh
evidence, support their ideas, and justify their answers
Stimulate vital, ongoing rethinking and meaningful
connections of big ideas, assumptions, and prior
lessons and learning; timeless in nature
Naturally recur, creating opportunities for transfer to
other situations and subjects
Perpetually arguable…the answers will change over
time for students as they see them again in new
subject settings and add new experience
So…
• “Instead of thinking of content as stuff to
be covered, consider knowledge and skill
as the means of addressing questions
central to understanding key issues in your
subject.” p. 107 UbD
From content to Big Ideas to EQ’s
Content
Big Idea/
Enduring
Understandings
Essential Questions
Nutrition
You are what you
eat
How does what
we eat affect us?
Fairness
Statistics can tell
any story
How do different
statistical tools
provide different
information?
Persuasive writing Language can be How can literary
used to support an devices be used to
argument
persuade?
From content to Big Ideas to EQ’s
Content
Big idea/
Enduring
Understanding
Westward
expansion
Hardship forged a
nation
Experiment
Composition of
images
Essential Questions
How did the
settlement of the
west contribute to
our nation?
Experiments are
How do variables
only as good as
increase reliability
their design
of experimental
results?
Composition is
Is a wellintegral to effective composed image
images
more effective?
Essential Questions from our Big
Ideas
• Design of curriculum influences the success of
our students.
– How does Backward design lead to better student
understanding?
• Big Ideas are uncovered from curriculum and
organize our teaching and assessment.
– How can Big Ideas be uncovered in our curriculum?
– What would students have to do to demonstrate they
understand the Big Idea?
Essential Questions from our Big
Ideas
• Essential Questions are generated from
Big Ideas and form the basis for our
lessons and student learning by linking
knowledge and skills to a greater purpose
and creating deeper understanding.
– How can Big Ideas be phrased so that
students understand them?
– What makes Essential Questions effective?
Future Learning Goals
1. On Feb 2nd …Time to work on extracting
the Big Ideas from one of your courses
and developing essential questions.
2. Ultimate goal is to develop a set of
“posters” that show these Big Ideas and
essential questions for use in the
classroom to anchor your teaching.