Enduring Understandings

From Understanding by Design (Wiggins & McTighe, 2005), the specific inferences, based on big ideas, that have lasting value beyond the classroom. In UbD, designers are encouraged to write them as full-sentence statements, describing what, specifically, students should understand about the topic. The stem “Students will understand that . . .” provides a practical tool for identifying understandings. In thinking about the enduring understandings for a unit or course, teachers are encouraged to ask, “What do we want students to understand and be able to use several years from now, after they have forgotten the details?” Enduring understandings are central to a discipline and are transferable to new situations. For example, in learning about the rule of law, students come to understand that “written laws specify the limits of a government’s power and articulate the rights of individuals, such as due process.” This inference from facts, based on big ideas such as “rights” and “due process,” provides a conceptual unifying lens through which to recognize the significance of the Magna Carta as well as to examine emerging democracies in the developing world.

Because such understandings are generally abstract in nature and often not obvious, they require uncoverage through sustained inquiry rather than one-shot coverage. The student must come to understand or be helped to grasp the idea, as a result of work. If teachers treat an understanding like a fact, the student is unlikely to get it.

Others (Glass, 2013) use the phrase essential understandings to mean something similar. All of these conceptions of understandings or big ideas share a common denominator: They are conceptually based statements that teachers invent or borrow and use as a guiding light to design curriculum and instruction that derive from standards. As Wiggins and McTighe (1998) state, “Enduring refers to the big ideas, the important understandings, that we want students to ‘get inside of’ and retain after they’ve forgotten many of the details. . . . Enduring understandings go beyond discrete facts or skills to focus on larger concepts, principles, or processes” (p. 10).

Sources:

Glass, K. T. (2013). Mapping comprehensive units to the ELA Common Core Standards. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.

Wiggins, G., & McTighe, J. (2005). Understanding by Design, 2nd Edition (2nd ed.). Alexandra, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.