The Rules of ‘Travel’:Disciplinary ‘Big Ideas’ in Interdisciplinary Contexts

William S. Moore, Ph.D.Coordinator, Assessment, Teaching &

LearningWA St. Bd. For Comm. & Tech. Colleges360-704-4346 bmoore@sbctc.ctc.edu

Learning Community Coordinators’ MeetingOctober 2004

Big Ideas Project Focus

• Broaden assessment conversation to include wider range of faculty

• Balance focus on ‘college-wide outcomes” with emphasis on disciplinary knowledge

• Address significant issues around purpose of and struggles with introductory courses

Central Question

Assume for the moment that the introductory course in your discipline or program is the LAST course that the students will ever take in the area.

What core discipline-specific ideas/concepts do you want ALL students taking the course to understand deeply, i.e., be apply to apply and even transfer to other settings five years later?

Meta-cognition about thinking &

learning

Deep Learning

Understandings ofcore concepts

Ways of reasoning

Re-Thinking Knowledge

• “Situated” or grounded in specific contexts in which it is used (and learned)

• Expertise as body of knowledge organized around “big ideas,” not isolated facts

All students come to us with prior ideas, and our first challenge is to bring what is inside, out: to make the internal external, to make the private public, to make the implicit explicit…That is the essence of pedagogy: putting the inside out, working on it together while it is out, then putting the outside back in…

Lee Shulman, “Teacher Development: Roles of Domain Expertise and Pedagogical Knowledge,”

2000

Making Thinking Visible

Role of Meaning-Making in Understanding Deep Learning

• Reflects critical underlying assumptions about knowledge (epistemology)

• Involves intellect and identity• Requires emphasis on un-

learning as well as learning• Describes increasingly inclusive

and complex forms of thinking

CONTENT(knowledge)

PROCESS(ways of

reasoning)

Meta-cognition about thinking & learning

BIG IDEAS(core concepts)

Providing Feedback (and Judgments) about Progress

What opportunities could you provide for students to

demonstrate their understanding of, and capacity

to reason with, the Big Ideas you think matter the most?

If you want your students to think the ways historians, biologists, or attorneys do, create assignments or classroom discussions that make it possible for them to make those moves, to understand them, and to reflect on their effects.

Mariolina Rizzi Salvatori, University of Pittsburgh, from Opening Lines: Approaches to the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, Pat

Hutchings (ed.), 2001

Good assessment tasks are

interchangeable with good

instructional tasks.Lorrie Shepard

“The role of assessment in a learning culture,” 2000

Designing Course-Embedded Assessment Tasks

Karen Sheingold, Joan Heller, & Susan Paulukonis, “Actively Seeking Evidence…,” ETS, 1994

What understandings & abilities do I want to assess?

What performances or work will allow students to

demonstrate these understandings & abilities?

What evidence in the performance or work tells me to what extent the students have

these understandings & abilities?

What activities do students have to do to learn how to generate these performances?