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Philosophical Foundation and Lifelong Goals

Big Ideas and Enduring Understandings

One of the key factors which distinguishes “expert” learners from “novices” is the ability to organize or cluster thinking around big ideas. This process allows more efficient retrieval of prior knowledge, as well as improved “mental filing” of new information. Therefore, teachers who are interested in
helping their students understand must be intentional about helping students construct their own mental “storage and retrieval” systems, and teachers must seek to learn about and implement meta-cognitive strategies that students can use to facilitate their meaning-making or understanding.

Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins explain in their seminal text, Understanding by Design (ASCD, 2005), that enduring understandings refer to the big ideas or important understandings “that we want students to ‘get inside of’ and retain after they’ve forgotten many of the details. Put differently… [the big ideas and understandings] implicitly answer the question, Why is this topic worth studying? Enduring understandings are statements summarizing important ideas and core processes that are central to a discipline and have lasting value beyond the classroom. They synthesize what students should come to understand as a result of studying a particular content area.
Moreover, they articulate what students should value about the content area over the course of their lifetimes. Enduring understandings should also enable students to make connections to other disciplines beyond the arts. A true grasp of an enduring understanding mastered through a variety of activities is demonstrated by the student’s ability to explain, interpret, analyze, apply and evaluate its core elements.

Artistic Processes and Anchor Standards