As I read the book, Making Thinking Visible by Ron Ritchart et al., I was struck by how similar his view of understanding is to Wiggins & McTighe’s Understanding by Design (UbD).  Both see understanding as not just a gathering of knowledge, but as the ultimate goal of education. Both owe a lot to Benjamin Bloom and his Taxonomy. Of course, the book is about thinking routines which are fast becoming ubiquitous in school classrooms. We use them a lot at our school and even in our PD sessions. If you haven’t read the book then I recommend you take a look.
I resonated with the following passage to the point that I read it to my mentor in one of our sessions last term. I felt it describes a change I have been/am going through in my own practice. Although I had a sense of a shifting emphasis, I hadn’t identified it in myself or framed it as well as Ritchart seems to. I’m not saying I have arrived, just that I relate to the shift from a focus on teaching to a focus on learning.
(I have made bold the sentences below that really spoke to me. I have cut and pasted a big chunk of text, but did so for the sake of context.)

How does one learn to teach? More to the point, how does one learn to teach well? We have to say the more time we spend in education, the more vexing we find this question. Not because there aren’t ready answers out there, but because the answers often seem to be too ready, too simplistic, and self-perpetuating in nature. It is easy to think of the job of teaching as delivering the prescribed curriculum to students. Indeed, when we train to be teachers we often focus on the methods of delivering content. There are even courses at the university level referred to as “methods” courses. In our early years of teaching we often struggle with getting the curriculum across and agonize over failed lessons aimed at doing just that. This view of teaching is ubiquitous, generally shared by parents and students as well as teachers themselves. We see it playing out in our language when we talk about teacher “training,” which usually means training in new methods. We see it in policymakers’ efforts to improve education, which generally focus on changing the curriculum with the assumption that teachers will then deliver that curriculum and schools will improve as a result. We see it in the calls for enhanced content knowledge for teachers, an important thing to be sure, but oftentimes promoted as sufficient for effective teaching in and of itself.
We believe this view of teaching, as little more than the delivery of content, is not only an overly simplistic view of teaching but also a dangerous one in that it puts the focus on the teacher and not the learner, casting the learner in a passive role and assuming that learning is merely taking in what has been delivered. As a result of this view of teaching and learning, assessments focus on the degree of absorption by the student of what the teaching has delivered. Thus, we create a distorted view of teaching that is self-reinforcing and divorced from what we know about supporting effective learning. We judge teaching effectiveness based on student absorption of material, and teaching becomes defined as the delivery of that material. The educational system becomes distorted, being more concerned with producing effective test takers than successful learners. Consequently, the answer to the question “How does one learn to teach?” becomes, “By mastering the content and developing some delivery strategies.” Oh, and you might want to learn some good classroom management techniques to deal with students’ rebellion against their imposed passivity.
In contrast, when we place the learner at the hub of the educational enterprise, our focus as teachers shifts in a most fundamental way that has the potential to profoundly affect the way we define teaching. With the learner at the center of the educational enterprise, rather than at the end, our role as teachers shifts from the delivery of information to fostering students’ engagement with ideas. Instead of covering the curriculum and judging our success by how much content we get through, we must learn to identify the key ideas and concepts with which we want our students to engage, struggle, question, explore, and ultimately build understanding. Our goal must be to make the big ideas of the curriculum accessible and engaging while honoring their complexity, beauty, and power in the process. When there is something important and worthwhile to think about and a reason to think deeply, our students experience the kind of learning that has a lasting impact and powerful influence not only in the short term but also in the long haul. They not only learn; they learn how to learn.
In Chapter One, we shared how this deeper understanding of the educational enterprise was pivotal in Mark Church’s evolution as a teacher. He is not the only one for whom this is true of course. The literature on teacher change suggests that this shift from a focus on teaching to that of learning is a central aspect of many teachers’ professional growth and integral to the process of learning to be an effective practitioner. Rather than seeing learning as the passive taking in of information, we must honor the fact that learning occurs as a result of our thinking and active sense making. Consequently, as teachers interested in both students’ learning and understanding, we have two chief goals: (1) creating opportunities for thinking and (2) making students’ thinking visible. Although these goals are not the same, they are synergistic and interdependent. When we create opportunities for thinking, we establish both the context and the need for making students’ thinking visible.
(pp. 25-26)