Sometimes in your journey through life, you encounter writers
or artists who speak in a language that feels like it was written just for you.
The things they say or show you may be brand new, but those things resonate and
reverberate with you, touching something that’s already there. They wake up
something inside you that feels absolutely your own, but also brand new.
Grant Wiggins was one of those people for me, and when we
lost him (far too young) on May 28, it hit me hard.
I can’t remember if my introduction to Grant Wiggins was
through his book, Understanding by
Design, co-written with Jay McTighe, or through a presentation at an ASCD
conference. Whichever it was, it happened years after I stopped being a classroom
teacher, and it made me wish (as all of my subsequent encounters with his
thought made me wish) that I had had access to his wisdom when I had young
people in my charge.
One of the first things that Grant
Wiggins introduced me to was the idea of the Essential Question—the open-ended,
thought-provoking query that can frame a curriculum unit or even an entire
year. In honor of that First Learning, here are five big questions that Grant
Wiggins posed, either in his books,
his presentations,
or his blog—five questions
that have rattled around in my brain for years, and have affected my thinking
and my work:
1) Who taught you how to think?
This question was posed as an opening activity/icebreaker at
a conference workshop, and the language was left deliberately vague. When
people asked Wiggins for clarification, he refused to provide it. “I don’t know
what I mean,” he said. “You tell me what I mean.” When it came time for us to
share, each of us discussed what we meant by “think,” and who it was who first
taught us how to do that thing. Interestingly, most of us came up with the
same, basic definition; we saw “think” as the ability to reason, argue, and
analyze. Many of us said that our parents had taught us to think, usually as
part of dinner table conversation. It spoke powerfully to the importance of a
family sharing meals and having time away from electronic devices to just…talk.
I know that for me, dinner was often a time of lively conversation and
sometimes fierce debate. Even when I wasn’t the focus of the argument, merely
witnessing the back and forth taught me a lot about the importance of being
able to communicate and defend a point of view.
2) What was a meaningful learning experience that was deliberately crafted and shaped for you?
This was another intriguing opening question and icebreaker,
and Wiggins was careful in the way he phrased it. He didn’t want us thinking
about life experiences that taught us valuable lessons (“…and I never stuck my finger in an electrical socket again…”), but
activities or experiences that had been deliberately crafted and shaped by
someone to produce learning. The language was left open to accommodate
non-classroom activities, if that’s what came to mind. And, as it turned out,
that is exactly what came to mind for most people in the workshop. When we
shared responses, we were surprised to find that almost no one spoke of an
academic classroom experience. For almost everyone, the meaningful learning
experience was something that had been led by an athletic coach or a choir director—the
kind of person most likely to teach through demonstration, or to set up some
kind of simulation or “scrimmage” activity to reveal people’s skills and
limitations. Even though we were all educators, very few of us connected our
most meaningful learning experiences with academic classroom teachers. It
reminded us that “teaching” takes many shapes and forms, and doesn’t live
solely in the schoolhouse…and that learning can be profound and important to
us, even when it’s not about math or language arts.
3) What is the job description for Classroom Teacher?
This question unleashed quite an interesting and contentious
debate in a workshop. Wiggins stood in front of a crowd of teachers and “outed”
himself as an addict: “I’m Grant Wiggins,” he said, “and I’m addicted to
content.” We all laughed, but it was a rueful laugh of recognition. We knew
what it was to be enslaved by the pacing plan.
“What’s our job, actually?” he asked us. “If our job
description is simply to deliver content, then it doesn’t really matter whether
the kids learn or not—that’s their job, not ours. So do we just march through
the content and call it a day?” Everyone groaned “No!”
“Then what is it?”
he asked. “If you were hiring, what kind of job description would you
write?” Step by step, he led us through
an activity of clarifying exactly what the job of teaching really entailed and
required. And in some places, the end result was a little surprising to us.
Where we ended up—pushed in Socratic fashion by Wiggins—was something like,
“the teacher shapes and directs activities and opportunities that cause
learning to happen in the student.” We realized there could be quite a
difference between “teaching,” as we had all traditionally defined it, and
“making sure learning happens.”
4) Why are you teaching that?
One of the questions that Wiggins and McTighe forced us to
grapple with in their seminal book, Understanding
by Design, is this existentially frightening one: why are you teaching what
you’re teaching? In other words: who needs it? Who wants it? Why should anyone
care?
Imagine someone bursting into your classroom, mid-lesson, and
asking questions like those. Would you have an answer at the ready for every
lesson you teach? Or would there be places where you’d have to say, “It’s just
what comes next?”
This is part of what Wiggins meant by being addicted to
content. There’s a comfort that comes from having a textbook or a pacing plan
that tells you what to do from day to day. But Understanding by Design challenged us to be more thoughtful and
active in our lesson planning, starting with the end in mind and working
backwards to the day-to-day. What’s the point of all of this? What’s the big
idea I want my kids to understand? How will I know that they have reached that
understanding? What knowledge or skills will I need to provide to help them to
get to that understanding? Planning backwards ensures that you know exactly why you’re doing what you’re
doing.
5) What is a standard?
In recent years, during the adoption and implementation of
the Common Core State Standards, Wiggins spent a lot of time, especially in his
“Granted, And…” blog posts,
helping people understand what we mean—and should mean—by the word “standard.” It’s
a topic that many of us have been arguing about—sometimes heatedly—without
figuring out if we’re all using the word the same way. That’s guaranteed to
lead to trouble.
Wiggins used his daughter’s experience running track—as he
had often used his own, and Jay McTighe’s experiences coaching sports teams—to
make powerful analogies about how we measure performance. And he offered up
insightful analysis of the new standards to show us where they were helpful and
where they might be lacking. As always, he challenged us to think twice or
three times about things we had assumed we understood. As always, he prized
conceptual understanding over factual knowledge, and was willing to dig (and
push us to dig) to get to what was
essential.
All of these questions have affected the way I think about
teaching and learning. When I reflect on presentations I’ve given and blog
posts or eBooks I’ve written, I can see how powerfully Grant Wiggins has shaped
my thinking. Although I only met him a couple of times, and never spoke with
him more than briefly, I have long considered him one of my gurus. And now he
is gone.
It’s a sad and strange thing when your wizards and wise-men
disappear. It’s another stage of growing up, I suppose—and it’s a little shocking
to realize how long that process really
is, how many years into adulthood it can
extend. We depend on the authority and protection of our parents when we are
children, but we lean on our heroes for far longer. We turn to their wisdom, and
sometimes their example, again and again. But a time comes when they leave us.
Either they reveal themselves as less than heroic and they abandon us (or we
abandon them), or we lose them to illness or old age. We learn that we have to
stand on our own, wise enough to take the right actions and strong enough to
defend our positions. We discover that others are relying on us now, to be their heroes and wizards, as frightening as that thought may be. It’s
our turn, whether we like it or not. We may never stride the world like the
giants we once knew, but we have to do the best we can.
There is a Wiggins-sized hole in the world of education, and
it will not soon be healed. It is a loss we will feel for some time. His words
are still with us, though, and his passion still burns, clear and hot, through everything
he wrote, and said, and shared. What we do with that fire is up to us.
