Grant Wiggins Quotes

(post from Kim Marshall in the Marshall Memo, issue 591 - a GREAT resource for busy educators at Marshallmemo.com)

            We lost a great educator and thinker last month. Grant Wiggins’s work with Jay McTighe on backwards curriculum unit design, assessment, and school improvement has made a huge difference in countless schools and elevated the entire profession. Here is a collection of his thoughts from recent years on three major topics:

Assessment and feedback

“Students should be presumed innocent of understanding until proven guilty by the preponderance of the evidence.”

“Results are what counts. You have to measure.”     

“Teachers over-plan and under-assess.”

“The more you teach without finding out who understands the information and who doesn’t, the greater the likelihood that only already-proficient students will succeed.”

“Practicing for a standardized test to raise the scores is like practicing for your physical exam to become healthy. It mistakes measures for goals.”

“Decades of education research support the idea that by teaching less and providing more feedback, we can produce greater learning. Basically, feedback is information about how we are doing in our efforts to reach a goal.”

“Students are entitled to a more educative and user-friendly assessment system. They deserve far more feedback – and opportunities to use it – as part of the local assessment process. Those tasks should recur, as in the visual and performing arts and in sports, so there are many chances to get good at vital work. When assessment properly focuses teaching and learning in this way, student self-assessment and self-adjustment become a critical part of all instruction…”

“If you really understand the topic, you should have no trouble handling a question that looks a little different from the questions the teacher asked. If you learned only by rote, however, a novel question will stump you.”

“Assessment tasks must model and demand important real-world work. Focused and accountable teaching requires ongoing assessment of the core tasks that embody the aims of schooling: whether students can wisely transfer knowledge with understanding in simulations of complex adult intellectual tasks. Only by ensuring that the assessment system models such (genuine) performance will student achievement and teaching be improved over time.”

“What makes any assessment in education formative is not merely that it precedes summative assessments, but that the performer has opportunities, if results are less than optimal, to reshape the performance to better achieve the goal. This is how all highly successful computer games work.”

Improving teaching and learning

“The point of school is not to get good at school.”

“No one masters something they are not passionate about.”

“By the very nature of the job of teaching, we are prone to be insensitive (literally) to the actual daily experience of our students, what they feel, unless we get outside of ourselves by acts of will.”

“For the majority of learners, school is a place where the teacher has the answers and classroom questions are intended to find out who knows them.” (with Jay McTighe)

“Like the music or athletic coach, the classroom teacher’s job is to help the student ‘play the game’ of the expert.”

“Expert coaches uniformly avoid overloading performers with too much or too technical information. They tell the performers one important thing they noticed that, if changed, will likely yield immediate and noticeable improvement.”

“Reform is strongly needed in many schools. Many teachers are just not currently capable of engaging and deeply educating the kids in front of them, especially in the upper grades. Why can’t we just admit this?” (from an open letter to Diane Ravitch)

“[T]eachers can be remarkably thin-skinned when someone questions their methods or decisions, and many of us resist seeking or receiving feedback from students, parents, colleagues, and supervisors. When students fail to learn, some teachers end up blaming the students, without an honest investigation of where student fault ends and teacher responsibility begins.”

“My question is basic, history teachers. Given that most history textbooks are comprehensive and reasonably well-written, why do you feel the need to talk so much? Your colleagues in science and English, for example, do not feel the same urge.”

“Without regular opportunities to consider, observe, and analyze best practice and receive

helpful, non-evaluative feedback, how likely are teachers to engage in continual professional improvement?” (with Jay McTighe)

“Being willing and able to rethink requires a safe and supportive environment for questioning assumptions and habits, as well as a curriculum designed to foster thinking,”

Backwards planning

“When curriculum is defined as a linear march through stuff covered once (and where no pre-tests are ever done), it is inevitable that we end up exaggerating differences and constantly talking (wrongly) about too many kids ‘falling behind.’ Falling behind what? Some mythical average ‘pace’ of teaching in a single way?”

“What we need to see more clearly is that the common learner failure to transfer is not a student weakness or a teaching deficit but a mistake in planning. You have to design backward from the goal of transfer if you want to achieve it… Too often, though, teachers merely teach, then ask in their tests: Did you learn my lesson?”

“To design a school curriculum backwards from the goal of autonomous transfer requires a deliberate and transparent plan for helping the student rely less and less on teacher hand-holding and scaffolds.” (with Jay McTighe)

“We contend that teachers can best raise test scores over the long haul by teaching the key ideas and processes contained in content standards in rich and engaging ways; by collecting evidence of student understanding of that content through robust local assessments rather than one-shot standardized testing; and by using engaging and effective instructional strategies that help students explore core concepts through inquiry and problem solving.”

“Knowing that you’re a novice who’s a long way from true mastery is not inherently debilitating. On the contrary, having a worthy, far-off goal and tracking your progress in closing the gap are key to mastery in all walks of life.”