 In this course we're going to talk a lot about understanding. Understanding is one of the key terminologies that you're going to have to really understand to be successful at teaching a course on Oversea, or teaching in general. What I'm talking about here is the difference between understanding and knowledge. What do you think about when you think about understanding, and what do you think about when you think about knowledge? Are those the same things, or are they different? Well, we at Oversea kind of believe that they're different. We kind of look at knowledge and we see all these little islands of information, kind of like facts laying around. And knowledge is the ability to recall those facts. It's the ability to say, this fact is this, this fact is this, and maybe we're able to make some connections within that. But we're not necessarily making that the goal of our learning. Knowledge-based learning to us seems sort of more like memorization, and kind of be recognized as something that maybe was a part of your own education. Now understanding-based education is a little different. You still have those little islands of knowledge, all these little facts. But understanding-based education has more to do with the grouping of those facts. It has to do with the way that you're able to understand them and make kind of groups of knowledge and sort of understand how they are connected. I think that's probably the most important point, really. How are they connected? And you want to really be able to draw connections, not just between individual facts like you were over here with knowledge, but you want to make sort of connections between these groups. You want to be able to say, this group is connected to this and this way, and you want to say, this is the cycle, this is the way that it's going, this is the direction that all this knowledge is going. And these are the core things that sort of connect all of these facts. They're all, and really in a perfect world, what you're doing with understanding is not necessarily building the connection between the individual facts of the course that you're building, but you're actually teaching people how to build these connections on their own. You're teaching your students how to look at a set of information and say, ah, I see the patterns, I see how it's all connected and I can do this myself. I can build this sort of, I can build this set of understandings myself. And that's the exciting thing about understanding-based education. And it's perfectly suited for a website like Alversity. It's actually really great because really, in a way, understanding-based learning is kind of like stories compared to lists. So there are all kinds of, I was going to take, for example, history. When you're learning about history, you can learn stories or you can learn lists of names and dates. And that's sort of the difference here. That's kind of what we're talking about in a way. It's not necessarily that because I think understanding is a little deeper than that. And knowledge is also a little bit more, it's a little more complicated than just lists obviously. But it's sort of like facts over on this side and systems over here. I would say systems and connections. It's a pretty important thing. Connections is very important. And so what could this maybe look like in maybe a history course? Like I was saying before, history is a perfect example of this. Recently I've been listening to a bunch of podcasts about the history of the Mongols. And one of the big things that kind of struck me is that traditionally I'd always just learned that as a set of dates. So maybe, for example, there was some kind of war. So maybe dates of a war would be a good example of knowledge. So remembering what year something happened, that's a great piece of knowledge to have. But a piece of knowledge is really kind of empty when you think about the fact that there's a story behind that. You think about why did a war happen when it did? Now that is an understanding. That is a question that's a little bit deeper. And even deeper question behind that is why do wars like this one happen in general? So how is war created in the first place? You really are trying to dive much deeper than just what happened but why it happened and all the systems and all the things that are connected to making it happen. And understanding even the very core mechanism that is behind the thing that you're talking about. So that's the kind of thing that you want to be having in mind while you're designing your course for all versatility. You want to be thinking about understandings. Knowledge is great, knowledge is awesome, but knowledge is also kind of for computers. We do live in the 21st century and like my friend Mackenzie in high school always said I can always Google that and it's true, you really can these days especially in the very sort of modern economy. It's not necessarily what all students are going to be having access to all the time. But knowledge is not necessarily as valuable as it once was and understanding is more valuable than ever. So keep that in mind while you're teaching. Now how do you make that a reality in your course? Let's talk about that. Translating understanding into your teaching is actually probably one of the coolest things that you can do and actually just learned this whole process myself about a year ago. I took this great trip to New York City and I was at the Columbia University and I met this great professor named Ellen Meyer and she pushed this book in my hand and she said you need to read this and it was called understanding by design and it's all about backward design. Now that is a funny word, backward. I actually have kind of a bad association with the word backward. It seems sort of like a mean word to be in some way. But in relation to teaching it's actually a really great thing. Backward design, what could that mean? Well I kind of tried to simplify the whole process a little bit because not everybody has time to go read the understanding by design book and do all kinds of thinking about this. Teaching is sort of in some ways practical and I would really recommend you go read books like this. I would really recommend you go read books about pedagogy. But since most of you really just want to start teaching I'm going to break it down into sort of a three step thing here. And this is what the authors of this sort of curriculum have already done. They call it something a little bit different but I would say step one is to sort of philosophize. And I hope I'm spelling this right. My spelling is horrible so you're going to have to deal with me on that. I would say your second stage you could kind of sum it up to saying the word think. That could kind of be one way of putting it. And then your third step is to plan. And from there you then go and teach. So I know it seems like a lot but there's actually a real system behind this and it's actually quite cool so I'll explain that to you. Philosophizing I would say is the process of going and finding the core understandings for the thing that you want to teach. Identifying them and sort of creating a plan. So putting them on a piece of paper I guess. That's probably the best way I should say it. So let's just put ID core understandings. And so core understandings aren't... What is a core understanding? How do I explain that to you? A core understanding is not maybe sort of a set of facts like we were talking about before but it's maybe a core thing that you want to teach. It's often sort of edges into like a moral or edges into a sort of broader picture understanding of a certain topic. So in math it's maybe not I want to teach them pre-algebra but I want to teach them the relationship between these sets of equations. That would be more of a core understanding rather than teaching them a certain skill, for example. You might want to try to... You're trying to emphasize sort of the philosophical side of your practice and at the same time getting at those skills. You don't want to just... It doesn't have to be all high-minded. You really do want to get these skills across. And that is another part of the philosophizing part. You want to sort of determine your goals. So you want to decide what are the learning goals? Maybe I want my students to know after they've done all this work for this course what should they know that they don't know now or what should they be able to do that they can't do now. But it's especially about that knowledge. It's especially about building those understandings. That's a very core part of it. Alright, so you've got that. Now you have to think about how do I transfer that? So you need to think about transfer and you kind of need to think about... I'm going to call it testing. Most people probably wouldn't like that word because it is a little bit... It's a little bit official. And it's also a little bit... It's a word that kind of has a little bit of an aftertaste, you know? Because everybody thinks of the word test and they're like... Well, teachers would probably call it assessing. So they're trying to figure out ways... You're trying to figure out a way that you can say, okay, this is what I wanted to teach them and this is what they've learned. And what sort of that space in between that I didn't get and how do I get that part taught? How do I bring my students to a place where they maybe even learn that themselves, for example? So you need to think about the transfer and about how you're going to assess. So you can write assess here, actually. We'll write assessment. And obviously it gives you all kinds of tools for assessment. It's not perfect yet because online stuff is not perfect yet but we're working on some things that maybe will give us some better solutions in the future here. And then it's all about planning. So then you kind of have to take a look at your core questions. So then you need to combine those core questions. I'm going to just put questions as a period. You then want to take those core understandings and determine which materials are best at getting at those core understandings. Maybe it goes the other way around. Maybe you find those materials and determine that these are core understandings that you want your students to have. And then you integrate those into a learning plan. In adversity, we have a design sheet and then we have a syllabus. And that is where all of this happens. The design sheet is sort of here. We try to kind of kickstart the philosophizing and the thinking. And then in step three, you move from that design sheet into creating a syllabus. And that is where you're creating the learning plan. And really important to this section is making sure that you're not doing any extra stuff. You want to make sure that everything you do connects back to that core question and to those core goals. And that's actually really important. We want to remember, don't forget these goals. Goals are the most important thing that you should have in your mind as a teacher. So you've got your core questions and I'm going to put in your goals as well. So in the end, it comes back to these two things. That's where you start and you come back around to them. And this middle step is really about finding the way that you do that. So that is kind of a little bit of a sort of very broad, broad description of understanding-based education. It's all about understanding connections. It's all about making those sort of deeper connections between little facts and groups of knowledge and things like that. And it's all about not killing and drilling. It's about finding ways of making an exciting, telling a story and really getting your students enjoying what they're doing. It's all about planning. So it's kind of perfect for online because you need to plan well, otherwise it's going to kind of flop. So that is your introduction. I hope that you enjoyed it. I hope that you understood it. I hope that I made a little bit of sense there. We're going to now move on to some more detailed lessons about planning for your course.