​What Happens When We Teach for Transfer Instead of Coverage?

Are we teaching for mastery or to tick it off the checklist?  There is a big difference? 

Coverage is a completion task. Transfer is a design task. When a teacher teaches for coverage, the question driving planning is: what do students need to know by the end of this unit? When a teacher teaches for transfer, the question is: what will students be able to do with this understanding in a context I have not designed for them? These produce completely different results.

A sign of coverage is when learners pass the end-of-unit assessment, but three weeks later they remember almost none of it. Not because they were not paying attention. Because the learning was organized around the unit, not around an idea that matters to the learner. 

Transfer begins with identifying the concept underneath the content. Not the topic, but a big, transferable idea. A unit on the water cycle is not really about the water cycle. It is about systems, cycles, and interdependence. Those ideas transfer to economics, to ecology, to human relationships, to history. A teacher who knows that is teaching for transfer from the first lesson. A teacher who does not know that is teaching the water cycle.

Wiggins and McTighe call this uncoverage, which is going deep on an idea that transfers rather than going wide across the content area. This requires genuine intellectual courage, because it means leaving things out. Coverage anxiety is real.  Passing the end of the year exam is real. The argument is not that coverage does not matter, but transfer matters more.  Yikes, did I just say that?!  Yes, I did. 
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Transfer in assessment asks learners to apply understanding to a situation they have not seen before. This means that they must solve a new problem in a different subject area with the same process.  There has not been any coaching by the teacher.  Let's be clear, it is not a harder version, just different.  It may feel harder to the learners, because they are being put into productive struggle withouth their knowlege.  This is how they remember and grow.  

Think of your next unit of inquiry or next term. What is the concept underneath the content? Where else in a learner's life will that concept appear? Design the last assessment first.  Make the context different than you have ever taught before.  If the learners can apply it, you know it transferred.   Good luck and comment here with your progress.