I have worked as a teacher and have worked in educational publishing. In my opinion teaching is: (1)deciding on what students should learn in a concrete way. (Example, this week children will be shown the differences between an apostrophe and a comma. Not the children will learn about the value of punctuation.) (2) Teaching the differences in some interesting way. (3) Testing the differences using a baseline of acceptability (Did I succeed as a teacher?)
Deciding that children will understand something is so vague, it cannot be tested. I cannot really know what you understand. I can only know what you can do (Example, place an apostrophe above the line and a comma on the line.)
There is absolutely nothing wrong with teaching to a test, if the test measures how you demonstrate you know the right stuff. All educators need to read this book:
http://www.amazon.com/Preparing-Instructional-Objectives-Development-Instruction/dp/1879618036
