Definition: Enduring Understandings

Enduring understandings are statements summarizing important ideas and core processes that are central to a discipline and have lasting value beyond the classroom. They synthesize what students should understand—not just know or do—as a result of studying a particular content area. Moreover, they articulate what students should “revisit” over the course of their lifetimes in relationship to the content area.

Enduring understandings:

1. frame the big ideas that give meaning and lasting importance to such discrete curriculum elements as facts and skills
2. can transfer to other fields as well as adult life
3. “unpack” areas of the curriculum where students may struggle to gain understanding or demonstrate misunderstandings and misconceptions
4. provide a conceptual foundation for studying the content area and
5. are deliberately framed as declarative sentences that present major curriculum generalizations and recurrent ideas.

Example:

Reading/Literature