• Introduction
• Definitions
• A Problem I Could Live With
• Understanding and Mastery
• The Inverted Pyramid
• Benchmark Understanding
• Against the Grain
• References
  and Acknowledgments
• Printable Text of Article

© Copyright 1998-99 by Randy Bass (bassr@gusun.georgetown.edu)   The right to make additional exact copies, including this notice, for personal and classroom use, is hereby granted. All other forms of distribution and copying require permission of the author.

Section Four:
The Inverted Pyramid

For me, the questions I have become most interested in pursuing as ongoing inquiry come back to the issues of teachingfor understanding and the match between vision, practice, and outcomes. Let me briefly describe two dimensions here. The first is what I came to call in my own practice the "inverted pyramid." In reconstructing my courses, and in asking myself how students come to understand what they do, I was led to a set of subsidiary questions. I asked myself what specifically were the four or five learning goals that I had for students in a particular course (as opposed to purely teaching goals or content/coverage goals)? Then I asked myself:

• What did I really believe (and what did I know) about what percentage of students were achieving all of the goals, some of the goals, one or two of them?
   
• If I had to pick one of these learning goals or outcomes as the one thing that students would retain from this course after leaving it, what would it be?
   
• Thinking about that one goal, then, could I honestly say that I spent the most amount of time in the course teaching to the goal I valued most?

I think of this as the "inverted pyramid" because in the schematization of my own teaching I perceived that I had my process upside down. That is, I decided (without going into any of the specifics here) that I spent the least amount of time teaching to the kind of understanding I valued most. I was teaching a whole range of subsidiary goals on the assumption that they would "add up" to the kind of paradigmatic understanding that I brought to the subject (the goal of mastery that builds on a wide base and narrows to the destination of paradigmatic understanding). If this was the best way to teach prospective majors, or the students in a class most likely to take more courses in the subject, I had no evidence of that, other than my own education experience; nor did I have any evidence that it was the best way to teach all students, especially the novice learners being introduced to the subject, and those who might possibly never take another literature course again.

Next Section: Benchmark Understanding

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