ABSTRACT
Early in my high school teaching career, I found myself saying the words the Mayan economy to a student in an urban high school populated by mostly lower income and minority students. Her pained response made me believe that I had three teaching tasks before me: I had to help her understand what an economy might be, what it could mean to be a Mayan, and that these concepts were useful. Although not a novice teacher, I had not anticipated that the conversation I wanted to have presupposed words and concepts I was familiar with and, apparently, she was not. I remember thinking that a student from a more affl uent community might come to school already equipped with these tools and thus save a teacher the time and eff ort of having to teach them. I also thought that a middle class student might not require as much persuasion that these concepts were worth knowing. I would have to rethink what I was doing. I felt frustrated and overwhelmed by the task. When Grant Wiggins came to my school to introduce his (and Jay McTighe’s) “backwards design” approach to curriculum writing I immediately appreciated its point that the proper end of curriculum planning was the measurable student learning of targeted understandings. I thought this clarity would empower teachers to be more eff ective. Later I realized that it could also help me to identify and teach tacit conceptual tools that could empower students’ thinking and mitigate the frustration my student and I shared in that moment.
