Summer 2014 Book Study Understanding by Design Cult of Pedagogy

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Summer 2014 Book Study: Understanding by Design | Cult of Pedagogy
Summer 2014 Book Study:
Understanding by Design
JUNE 23, 2014
JENNIFER GONZALEZ
(https:/
/amzn.to/2AiZQNR)
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Understanding by Design
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/amzn.to/2AiZQNR)
Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe
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I chose this book for our first book study because it introduces some pretty
revolutionary ideas about how we approach instruction. Still, the the reading can
be challenging, so working through the book with the support of a group seems
to be the best way to learn the concepts.
To get us started, I will offer my own comments on each chapter: a brief
summary, a few notes on things that made an impression on me, then a
question or two for you.
Jump into the conversation however you’d like: Provide your own reactions, ask
your own questions, or answer some of mine. And be sure to talk about things
that confused or frustrated you, so we can all learn more together. If your
interpretations differ from mine in any way, please say so: I’m making my best
guess here and would love to hear how others are understanding the book.
One way you might approach this study is to look at it through the lens of a unit
you’ve taught in the past that didn’t go as well as you hoped — by applying UbD
principles to that unit, you’ll be able to apply what you’re learning, and end up
with a fresh new unit to teach next school year.
INTRODUCTION
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Most of us plan students’ learning experiences in a way that does not actually
result in deep understanding, focusing instead on “activities” or on simply
covering lots and lots of information.
Personal Notes: Two things made the biggest impression on me in the
introduction:
The twin sins of design. This section really struck a chord with me, because I
have long been bothered by activity-focused teaching. It’s always bugged
me when I see “interdisciplinary” units where inter-content connections are
flimsy and superficial. Coverage-focused teaching has also always seemed
wrong to me: When I hear colleagues talk about how many chapters they
still have to get to, it sounds like a race with no real learning happening. It’s a
relief to see both issues being addressed here and knowing that a better
alternative is going to be presented in the book.
The cautions and comments near the end. I appreciated that the authors
noted that not ALL teaching has to aim for deep understanding, that the
UbD approach is compatible with standards-based teaching, and that it
does not prescribe any specific teaching methods. I think all of these are
important to know going in.
Questions for You: Which of these sins are you most guilty of? When you read
about the “twin sins,” did you feel defensive at all? What arguments, if any, came
up in your mind to defend these approaches?
CHAPTER 1: BACKWARD DESIGN
Instead of using the traditional approach to teaching, where we plan readings,
activities and lessons, then consider how to test what students have learned,
we should take a backward design approach: clearly defining what students
should know and be able to do at the end of a unit, designing the summative
assessment(s), THEN planning the learning experiences that will lead to success
on those assessments.
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Personal Notes:
This chapter will cut deeply for some teachers, because it may make them
defensive about the idea that they have been doing something “wrong.” I
hope people can see this as an opportunity to build units that have a more
lasting impact on student learning, rather than a personal attack on their
teaching.
This makes me think about the way I used to “teach” novels. We would
“do” S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders, a unit I looked forward to every year. I
would pull vocabulary and plot-based comprehension questions from each
chapter, and students would be quizzed mostly to make sure they were
reading. We had a few discussions (or maybe it was mostly me “discussing”),
and then we’d finish with a unit test and a movie day, where I’d get to
introduce a whole new generation of kids to the glory that was young Matt
Dillon. But if you asked me why we read it, what students were supposed to
get out of that unit, I would probably say something about it being a classic
coming-of-age story and how it was important to expose students to good
books. I never really had to articulate bigger understandings, what students
should understand and be able to do by the time they finished. With the
UbD approach, I would still probably include The Outsiders as an option for
reading, but it would be part of a larger unit of study that addressed richer,
more complex goals.
The UbD template and example (Bob Jones’ nutrition unit) are where
readers sometimes start feeling overwhelmed. My advice is to take these
slowly, and read the Bob James stuff carefully – following his example is a
really good way to start internalizing the UbD approach; if you skip it, you’ll
start to feel lost. Also, know that most of the elements they introduce in this
chapter are just previews – they go into more detail about all of them later
on.
Questions for You: Tell us about one of your units that has never quite produced
the results you hoped for; either students performed poorly on the test, they
didn’t retain the information later, or you just felt dissatisfied in some way. How
might the backward design approach change the way you teach it?
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CHAPTER 2: UNDERSTANDING UNDERSTANDING
How do we know if students really understand what we’re teaching them? To
answer this question, we have to think carefully about what it looks like when
someone understands the concepts we’re trying to teach. This is our first step
toward designing appropriate assessments for our units.
Personal Notes:
When students perform well on tests that ask for basic factual recall, we
might assume that they understand far more than they actually do. I see
evidence of this problem everywhere in our schools – in the fact that
teachers regularly complain that students “didn’t learn anything” in the
grades leading up to theirs, in the way we can teach something one month
and observe students “forgetting” it the next month, and in the way
students throughout time have had trouble telling anyone what they learned
that day.
The concept of transfer is important to grasp here – to say that students
truly understand a concept, they should be able to transfer that knowledge
to a new situation or context.
I also appreciate the concept of the expert blind spot. Because we know our
subject areas so well, we already see the forest for the trees and can’t
understand why students don’t. The trouble is, we fill in a lot of gaps
without realizing it, whereas students have none of the experience required
to do that. So merely covering facts isn’t enough.
This chapter just primes our thinking about assessment, to change our
mindset about the difference between covering/checking and looking for
deep, transferable understanding. More specific types of evidence and
assessments are explored in chapters 7 and 8.
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Questions for You: Think about one of your end-of-unit assessments that
doesn’t really assess any kind of deep understanding. When you think about the
language of the unit objectives, what kind of understanding should you be
looking for? How does that differ from what you were asking on the original
assessment?
CHAPTER 3: GAINING CLARITY ON OUR GOALS
As we figure out what we want students to understand by the end of our unit,
we need to concentrate on “big ideas” – the linchpins that hold the unit
together. These big ideas can be communicated to students in essential
questions.
Personal Notes:
This is one of the chapters where I think people get lost. There is a lot of
theory and abstract thought, and though you’ll get a lot out of it with slow,
careful reading, you may not have that kind of time. Here are the things that
stood out for me:
“By asking for Essential Questions, we are encouraging designers to avoid
coverage and to commit to genuine inquiry” (58). I appreciate this because I
have always had a tendency to gloss over the “big picture” concepts (such as
the thought-provoking questions that open up a textbook section) in favor
of getting right into the stuff that could more easily be measured.
“…we find that many teachers overlook the enabling skills at the heart of
long-term successful performance” (59). This reminds me of when I worked
with student teachers on their big units. Most of them included, as part of
their post-assessment, at least one constructed or extended response
question that required students to provide evidence to support a claim. This
was in language arts, social studies, and science. Despite the regular
appearance of this type of question, their units rarely included practice in
the skill of making that kind of claim, finding evidence to support it, and
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putting all of that together into a coherent paragraph, even though the
extended response question was usually weighted more heavily than the
other questions on the test.
The Prioritizing Framework (Figure 3.3, page 71) is for me one of the most
important concepts in the book. The idea that not all content in a unit is
equal is so liberating – we can concentrate on the most important things,
and if there’s time, get to that outer ring. Making this kind of diagram
transparent to students also seems like it would help them focus better on
the really important stuff.
The Transfer Demand/Degree of Cue Rubric (79) made me instantly think
of problem-based (or project-based) learning, which was not a high-profile
trend the first time I read this book. For those interested in PBL, the UbD
philosophy will dovetail really nicely in terms of pedagogy.
Questions for You: Again, think of a unit you’ve taught that produced
disappointing results. Could you re-frame the unit with essential questions?
Were there skills you could have given more practice in that would have helped
the final outcome? In looking at Figure 3.3, how might you rearrange your
content? Would you drop some concepts?
CHAPTER 4: THE SIX FACETS OF UNDERSTANDING
We use the word “understand” in a lot of different ways. If we are going to
design units based on student understanding, we need to first be very clear on
which type of understanding we’re looking for in a given unit. Once we have
that clarity, we should design assessments that measure that specific kind of
understanding, then plan learning experiences that give students an
opportunity to develop it.
Personal Notes: Here, for the sake of reference, I’ll just quickly list each facet,
along with my interpretation of the authors’ recommendations for instruction
that nurtures it.
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Facet 1: Explanation. The student can “provide sophisticated theories and
illustrations, which provide knowledgeable and justified accounts of events,
actions, and ideas.” Instructionally, we should provide opportunities for
students to wrestle with questions, problems and issues. Assessments
should require students to provide explanations on their own, rather than
recall or recognize others’ explanations.
Facet 2: Interpretation. The student can interpret and translate items in
order to assign greater meaning than what lies on the surface. In our units,
we should give students practice with interpreting “inherently ambiguous
matters.” When studying well-established or “expert” interpretations, it
should be for the sake of examining the process of making meaning, or to
test its validity, not to hold up that interpretation as the final word.
Facet 3: Application. The student can “use knowledge effectively in new
situations and diverse, realistic contexts.” To develop this kind of
understanding, we should give students a clear performance goal to work
toward, keeping that in mind throughout the unit and giving students an
opportunity to practice that performance as much as possible.
Facet 4: Perspective. The student can offer “critical and insightful points of
view,” recognizing that “any answer to a complex question…is often one of
many possible plausible accounts.” Instruction and assessment for
perspective should have students “confront alternative theories and diverse
points of view regarding the big ideas.”
Facet 5: Empathy. The student can “get inside another person’s feelings
and worldview.” Whereas perspective is “cool, analytic detachment…
empathy is warm.” Instruction for empathy must provide more experiences
— direct or simulated — of the kinds of ideas that are usually presented
abstractly, like this teacher’s landmark classroom experiment in racism
(http:/
/cultofpedagogy.com/iowa-teacher-racism-experiment/)
.
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Facet 6: Self-Knowledge. The student demonstrates “the wisdom to know
one’s ignorance and how one’s patterns of thought and action inform as
well as prejudice understanding.” To teach for this, we should provide
ongoing opportunities for students to reflect on their knowledge and
learning styles. (Although the authors did not mention this, I would add that
teacher modeling of self-reflection is also a powerful tool in helping
students develop this skill.)
Questions for You: Do any of these facets strike you as the kind of
understanding you’ve always looked for in your students, but never actually
prioritized in your instruction? What kinds of learning opportunities do you need
to add to the unit to help students develop those kinds of understandings?
CHAPTER 5: ESSENTIAL QUESTIONS: DOORWAYS TO
UNDERSTANDING
* A good UbD unit must start with well-crafted essential questions, questions
that do not have simple, memorizable answers, but ones that provoke thought,
discussion, exploration, and more questions. “Instead of thinking of content as
stuff to be covered, consider knowledge and skill as the means of addressing
questions central to understanding key issues in your subject” (107). The best
units are built around sets of interrelated questions.
* Overarching questions (broad, general, more philosophical in nature – dealing
with the “big ideas”) are valuable for framing courses and programs of
study. Topical questions (leading students to more specific understandings) help
us design instruction within a unit.
* Although it is important to carefully word questions, it’s more important to
consider their intent: What do you plan to have students do with that question?
It’s possible to use a question that appears to have a single correct answer (“Is
the universe expanding?”) to launch a complex unit. And one that appears
open-ended might ultimately lead to a pretty predictable endpoint: “Teachers
sometimes ask intriguing questions as a setup for very specific and bland
teaching” (112).
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What essential questions are you coming up with? I would love to hear some of
them. If there is one you’re struggling with, throw it out to us and see if others
can help you shape it.
CHAPTER 6: CRAFTING UNDERSTANDINGS
I had a hard time staying focused while reading this chapter, and I’m pretty sure
I missed some stuff. Because Understandings and Essential Questions are so
closely tied, I think it would have helped to have both in the same chapter.
It helped me a lot to refer to the completed design template that starts on page
327, so I could get a sense of where these go in the plan.
With that said, here’s what I got from this chapter:
Well-crafted understandings are written as full-sentence
generalizations about the topic. These are principles that true experts
would know. They are not just statements of fact, but rather things people
are most likely to misunderstand if they don’t know the subject well.
The questions in figure 6.3 (page 137) are a good way to think deeply about
your subject to pinpoint what understandings you want students to gain.
When we develop these written understandings, we do it for us, the
instructors, not the students. They don’t need to be crafted in a way that
makes sense to students, nor do they need to be shared with them.
As I read this book, I wonder whether some teachers are getting thrown by the
language. When I worked with pre-service teachers, I drilled into their heads the
importance of NOT using words like understand when writing instructional
objectives. That’s impossible to measure, I told them. Use measurable,
observable terms. And I still believe that. So I think it’s important to note that
this chapter is not about writing instructional objectives – that process happens
when planning the individual lessons.
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How are you doing with this? Is there a particular chunk of your content that you
need help with in developing a desired “understanding”?
CHAPTER 7: THINKING LIKE AN ASSESSOR
* This is such an important and useful chapter, and it’s where we really start to
head in the “backward” direction: Once we’ve crafted goals and essential
questions, the next step is to plan our assessments. To begin, we need to figure
out what will prove that our students “get it.” When the unit is done, what
evidence will show that they truly understand what we want them to
understand?
* We are urged to use a variety of assessments in a unit – collecting a
“scrapbook” of evidence rather than just a single “snapshot.” These assessments
should be viewed on a continuum, with informal checks at one end, followed
by tests and quizzes and academic prompts, and culminating in performance
tasks: projects that simulate real-world settings. Performance-based
assessment is a necessity, not an option. This may bother some readers,
because performance assessments take longer to plan, implement, and grade.
(This is one reason education has strayed so far in the direction of standardized
testing: It’s easier to manage. But as many like Diane Ravitch
(http:/
/cultofpedagogy.com/reign-of-error/)
and José Vilson
(http:/
/cultofpedagogy.com/vilson-this-is-not-a-test/)
have argued, tests are incredibly limited in their ability to measure true learning.)
* Tests and quizzes do have their place in the UbD framework, however. As an
efficient way to check for basic, factual knowledge and application of skills, they
should be used formatively to see if students are acquiring what they need in
order to succeed on the performance assessment.
* To help us design assessments, the authors offer several really useful tools,
including the GRASPS model for developing performance assessments, lots of
examples from different content areas, and an explanation (figure 7.9) of how the
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six facets of understanding can help us craft just-right assessment tasks.
Tell us about a performance assessment you’re considering. How is it different
from the way you’ve previously measured understanding? What concerns do
you have?
CHAPTER 8: CRITERIA AND VALIDITY
* Now that we have chosen assessments, we need to decide what the specific
criteria are for judging how students perform on them. “Appropriate criteria
highlight the most revealing and important aspects of the work (given the
goals), not just those parts of the work that are merely easy to see or score”
(173). This is SO crucial, and I’m sure if we’re all honest with ourselves, we’ll
admit to sometimes assessing for things that are simply easy to measure,
regardless of how vital those things are to a deep understanding of our content.
We need to be sure our criteria come directly from our goals.
* For performance assessments, we need to develop rubrics that clearly outline
our criteria. (To learn more about the different types of rubrics and download
free templates, see our article on holistic, analytic, and single-point rubrics
(http:/
/cultofpedagogy.com/holistic-analytic-single-point-rubrics/)
). We are urged to refine these rubrics over time, after examining student work
that demonstrates the desired understandings and getting a clearer sense of
what that understanding really looks like.
* It is crucial that we check our assessments for validity by asking two key
questions: (1) Could a student do well on this task, but really not demonstrate
the understandings you are after? (2) Could a student perform poorly on this
task, but still have significant understanding of the ideas? If you answer “yes” to
either question, your assessment has a validity problem.
* We also need to consider the reliability of our assessments: If a student’s
understanding is measured by only one score on one test, we can’t necessarily
infer that they understand. We need to give students multiple opportunities to
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show their understanding over time.
What was your big “aha” moment in this chapter? What concept will lead to the
most significant change in the way you assess student understanding?
CHAPTER 9: PLANNING FOR LEARNING
* Now that we have designed our assessments, we’re ready to plan the learning
activities that will lead to success on them. Note the authors use the term
“activities” – not to be confused with activity-focused design, but rather to
suggest that we are not merely planning lessons where we are front and center,
but a variety of experiences to lead students to learning. Some of these will be
direct instruction, but many more will involve other kinds of work.
* We are given the acronym WHERETO to guide our planning. Each letter is
meant to label a different type of activity. For example, “H” activities hookour
students, getting them interested in the material and planting questions in their
minds. Activities labeled with the first “E” (E1) equip students with necessary
experiences, tools, knowledge and know-how (these are considered the core of
the learning plan). “T” activities are tailored to individual strengths and interests
– the differentiated ones.
* Note that WHERETO is not a prescribed sequence; we do not plan learning
activities in this precise order. I see it more like a “to do” list: A good unit should
contain some of every element, but we decide how and when to do them. Each
unit’s needs will be different, and some will require more of certain elements:
Looking at the completed design template on page 331, you’ll see how one
teacher sequenced activities for a unit and coded each item with an element of
WHERETO. Some elements are used over and over, while others happen only
once or twice, and some activities can be labeled with more than one element.
Which of the WHERETO elements do your former plans lack? I have always
been lazy with the H and the R (reflection). I wanted to use as much class time
as possible for the “important stuff,” the direct instruction and practice, and I
know my lessons suffered as a result. Had I built more time in for both of these,
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my students would have been more plugged in and would have a better
understanding of why we were doing what we were doing. If I built my units
around good essential questions (which I mostly didn’t), these types of activities
would have been a much more natural part of the plan.
And…this is as far as I got. I originally planned to read and summarize the whole
book, but I ended up moving on to other things. If you were counting on this
getting all the way through, I apologize! Those who come here and would like to
leave their thoughts on chapters 10-13, please do so in the comments so others
who are that far in the book can learn from and dialogue with you.
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