Process

Process describes activities designed to ensure that students use key skills to make sense of, apply, and transfer essential knowledge and understandings.

How students take in and make sense of the content.

Process is how students comes to understand or make sense of the content. Real learning - of the sort that enables students to retain, apply, and transfer content- has to happen in students, not to them (National Research Council, 2000; Wiggins & McTighe, 1998). The word process is often used as a synonym for activities. However, activities can be misaligned with content goals and fail to require students to think through, grapple with, or use essential knowledge, understanding, and skills. Therefore, it is wise to substitute the terms sense-making activities to emphasize that what we ask students to do in the name of learning or practice should help them "own" the content, see how it makes sense, and realize how it is useful in the world outside the classroom.