Framing Instruction with Big Ideas and Transferable Skills

Content standards exist to help teachers prioritize work bridging between deep understanding of transferable Big Ideas and assessable competence at core performance-related tasks. Directly opposed to this framework is the presentation (and often rote memorization) of discrete units of unconnected knowledge seemingly unguided by overarching goals.

To design instruction which helps students learn transferable strategies via Big Ideas lessons should be framed within the context of their field creating structure and scaffolds for students to construct knowledge upon. Facilitated learning leads students to the central most important ideas within a topic building a bridge between what students already know and engaging students in a sense-making process to understand that which they do not know about how the disparate facts in a field are connected.