Every day, I get to spend time in classrooms. I get to witness teachers teaching and students learning. Because this is my everyday existence, it would be easy to take the rigor I see for granted, but I don’t because I am constantly zooming out and reflecting upon what I am observing. I recently returned to a body of research on teaching for understanding, which affirms the power and promise of the rigorous, project-based learning in which we are engaged at Summers-Knoll school.

As David Perkins (co-principal investigator of the Teaching For Understanding initiative and author of Making Learning Whole: How Seven Principles of Teaching Can transform Education) writes, “Our real criterion for understanding has to be performance. People understand something when they can think and act flexibly with what they know about it, not just rehearse information and execute routine skills” (Perkins, 2009, p.49).

To help you see how SK teachers’ and students’ work reflects the principles of teaching for understanding, let me shine a light on some of the upper school students’ achievements over the past several weeks:

On January 31st, the upper school students put the final, polishing touches on their original short stories and submitted them to the Ann Arbor District Library annual, state-wide kid and teen writing contests. These annual contests, which SK has turned into a short story project, provides students with an authentic purpose and audience, outside of SK, for which to write. Since 2023, several SK students have placed among the top three in the state for their grade level.

In this short story project and for the contests, students begin writing their stories in November, and they iteratively work through the entire writing cycle (e.g., idea generation and selection, drafting, revising and editing) as they bring their pieces to a point where they are ready for submission. Along the way, they give and receive feedback from peers and teachers. They develop their identities, skills, and strategies as writers.

Concomitantly, the upper school students have been learning about the human body, cells, and systems. Starting with an analysis of how the various members of a soccer team work together (something the students know well from a nonacademic perspective), they applied this metaphor to an inquiry-based study of how the various parts of the human body enable its myriad functions. Now, in their final week of this project, each student is wrapping up their individual project presentation. With a choice of modality, each student has created a visual (re)presentation of a human activity (e.g., throwing a snow ball, playing a video game). Their representations reflect a depth of understanding about the content; high degrees of hand-drawing and graphic design skills; the attention to detail and care with which they’ve synthesized their learning – all of which reflects an incredibly high standard for quality.

Overlapping with the short story and human body projects, the upper school students selected characters for their next project, Place Out of Time (POOT), an annual collaboration with the University of Michigan. In this online simulation, students engage in a debate about current civic issues from the perspective of an historical figure. After conducting research on their chosen figure, they create a character profile and participate in online dialogues with other historical figures through the POOT platform.

Clearly, the upper school teacher, Ian, and his students have been busy, but as you can see, this is not “busy work” by any means. It’s all meaningful. It matters. It matters to the students because the projects connect to their lives, allow for their voice and choice, and require them to share what they have learned with an audience outside of SK. They are not merely turning in assignments for their teachers to grade, but rather, they are producing polished pieces of writing, preparing presentations, and conducting research on historical figures so that they can engage in high-level perspective-taking through critical conversations about current civic issues.

When teachers teach for understanding, students are doing something with what they are learning. They are synthesizing and transferring knowledge and then transforming it into something tangible. This is the SK way.