WIDE World

TfU: Stretch Socks for Teaching and Learning

An interview with Dr. David Perkins, regarding his trip to Australia to speak about Teaching for Understanding and other educational topics

How can TfU be applied to all courses, regardless of geographical area?

One of the remarkable things about TfU is its flexibility. Originally the TfU framework was developed with a focus on high school. Those were the teachers we involved initially, those were the students we involved initially. But in the years subsequent to its initial development, teachers have taken a hold of TfU and applied it to a startling range of levels and a startling range of subject areas. It's been used down to the earliest grades and it's been used at the university postgraduate level. And it's been used for just about any discipline you can think of. Basically flexibility is in its bones. It's not about any particular subject inherently, like physics or math or literature. It's not about any particular level of difficulty. It's like stretch socks - it's stretch socks for teaching and learning. [Editor's note: Adjustable to any length of leg!]

Presumably that can be easily translated across the seas to schools in Australia, or Asia, or ...?

Yes, geographical locale has nothing to do with it. Even less to do with it than discipline, say, or age. Language has nothing to do with it. It's been widely used in Spanish, for example.

When you were talking to educators in Australia, what were the schools looking at in terms of technology and professional development? What are their goals for their teachers?

I was specifically in the Victoria Province of Australia. Australia, like the United States, has states or provinces. And they have their individual educational agendas. Right now, Victoria has developed a very progressive educational agenda. It includes an emphasis on understanding in the disciplines, it includes an emphasis on thinking and the development of thinking abilities. It includes an accent on personal development as well. These are incorporated into the official Victorian standards for learning across the ages.

In addition, there's a keen interest in Victoria on providing technological capacity to support education. Within the next couple of years they expect to have every school served by a high bandwidth connection. They expect to have very substantial numbers of computers available to students right across the province. Broadly speaking then, Victoria is in the midst of an educational and technological renaissance.

Did they have specific problems and points that you felt WIDE World could help them with?

I can certainly say that it seems like an excellent fit with some of their needs. For one thing, the new curriculum standards, with their emphasis on understanding and thinking, follow on a more conservative period in Victorian education. Consequently, there's a search underway for how to engage these challenges. There's a need for frameworks, there's a need for perspectives, there's a need for structures of participation - teacher development, teacher colleagueship and so forth. My sense of the matter is that WIDE World offerings and platforms meld very well with that emerging need.

Are they using TfU now in their schools? In Tasmania, for instance, they have a detailed plan for Effective Teaching that implements some TfU principles.

A number of people in Victoria seem to be familiar with TfU. But of course, the TfU materials have been available for some time. And a number of people I spoke with were acquainted with them, people highly placed in the ministry were acquainted with them, and found them valuable and were recommending attention to them. I was also asked to speak directly to it, because people were familiar with it, and [I was] someone who knew more about it.

Does Victoria have a standardized test system?

They do have a standardized test system. The idea is to make this system of standardized testing relatively enlightened. The testing system is under reconstruction with that in mind, and of course we will have to see just how it turns out, but that's very much the spirit at this point.

So there are certainly the usual risks around that, but as I've encountered various perspectives on standardized testing here and there, I would say that this is one of the most progressively minded ones.

That idea of having enlightened testing. Can you have such a thing with TfU? I thought it was a more comprehensive way of looking at learning that you couldn't necessarily test for, or test with?

That's a complicated matter. It's not particularly problematic to test for understanding. The trick is to test for understanding economically at scale. That's the idea, of course, of high stakes testing - is that everybody gets tested and in a way that's reasonably economical, so that the national or state system can support the enterprise and can use this as a kind of a gauge of how schools and classrooms and students are doing. For that kind of testing, this puts pressure on TfU. Nonetheless, it's certainly possible to prepare test items, even multiple-choice items, that are much more understanding-oriented than others. It's a matter of the task imposed, and whether, say, the multiple choice you give is one that requires you to have understood something, rather than just remembered something.

So it comes back to the questions you ask.

It comes back to the nature of the questions you ask. It's perfectly possible to design even multiple-choice tests that are understanding-oriented, rather than fact- or routine skill-oriented. Of course, in some cases one goes further. It's also possible to use open ended items where you have to write a paragraph or something like that, and the designers have to bear the burden of systemizing some kind of evaluative process where human beings rate or evaluate those paragraphs. These can certainly be done at scale. So it's possible to have relatively enlightened high stakes testing systems.

Now from the TfU standpoint, from the pedagogical standpoints, that's not very important. Of course, from the perspective of TfU the role of assessment, we usually call it ongoing assessment, is to provide feedback to the learner and teacher early and often to boost the learning process. This is very different from end of year assessment or something like that that takes stock of the whole system.

In a sense TfU as a pedagogy is not very interested in high stakes testing. That's another matter.

Your goal then, if you could have your dream, would be to have every country invested in TfU, every school having some knowledge of it and practice in it? One thing that WIDE World has always emphasized is the common language between people who take the courses.

If you had to have one pedagogy in a common language I think TfU is a pretty good choice. I think it's a good thing to know about. It's relatively accessible and relatively powerful. It allows an easy entryway for teachers with initially different styles and in fact allows them to keep different styles and develop their own versions, if you will, of TfU. Not in the sense that you can do any old thing, but in the sense that it is perfectly possible to be a little more progressive or a little more conservative within TFU. It is perfectly possible to accommodate different levels of challenge, different styles and so on.

That said, I'm not a doctrinaire kind of guy. I would hesitate to say that everyone should use this pedagogy because this is the right pedagogy and others are wrong. There are many good ideas about teaching and learning for understanding out there in the world, and it's easy to make complex arguments about how they trade off against one another. And also I don't think a doctrinaire mindset is very good in the contemporary world. I would have a couple of reservations along those lines. It's a way, not the Way. But I do think it's a very good way.


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