Your Big Ideas: What is your course really about?
Before diving into specific learning objectives and lesson plans, it’s helpful to pause and ask: What is this course really about, and what big ideas or key questions will shape students’ learning?
Articulating your course purpose helps you see beyond the content you need to cover to identify what truly matters for lasting learning.
When you can clearly articulate your course’s big ideas and enduring understandings, you create a foundation for more purposeful, coherent, and meaningful learning experiences.
Big Ideas & Enduring Understandings
Big ideas are the core concepts that organize your discipline—the key ideas that help students make sense of the subject. They are broad, conceptual, and transferable across topics and contexts.
Enduring understandings go a step further. They are the specific insights you want students to take away about those big ideas—the “so what” that students should remember and be able to apply long after the course ends.
The difference is helpful to keep in mind:
Big ideas name the concept; enduring understandings explain what’s important about it.
Focusing on both helps you move beyond listing topics and instead design learning that supports deeper, more lasting understanding.
Application: identify and draft the big Ideas & enduring understandings in your course.
Identify the big ideas in your course—the core concepts that organize your discipline and are worth really understanding (not just memorizing).
- Biology: evolution, structure and function
- History: causation, continuity and change
- Economics: scarcity, incentives
- Literature: narrative voice, symbolism
- Math: patterns, modeling
From there, think about the enduring understandings—what you want students to remember and use years from now. These are the key insights that make the content meaningful.
- Biology: Small genetic changes can lead to major evolutionary shifts over time
- History: Historical accounts reflect the perspectives of those who write them
- Economics: Individual choices can lead to unintended collective outcomes
- Literature: Authors’ choices shape how meaning is interpreted
- Math: Models help us see patterns, but always have limits
A quick way to think about it:
Topic → Big Idea → Enduring Understanding
Canadian Confederation → nation-building and competing interests → political change often emerges through negotiation and compromise among groups with differing priorities and identities reconciled within existing systems
Why this matters:
Focusing on big ideas and enduring understandings helps you move beyond content coverage and design learning that is more meaningful, connected, and lasting.
Hawker Brownlow Education. [Hawker Brownlow Education]. (2013, 07. 13). What is understanding by design? Author Jay Tighe explains [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8F1SnWaIfE&t=59s
Dive into this video and reflect on this question:
Given the enduring understandings you’ve articulated, in what specific real‑world or discipline‑relevant contexts do you expect students to transfer those understandings, and what performance‑based evidence will you design so that students can show they can use their learning in those contexts, not just repeat it?
Key Takeaways
Big ideas name the concept; enduring understandings explain what’s important about it.
Purpose drives design: Clear course purpose guides coherent, lasting, and connected learning experiences.
Learning beyond recall: Focus on enduring understandings to promote real-world transfer and application.
