Understanding+by+Design

Marye Smith

**Understanding by Design**


 * __Description __**

Understanding by Design (UbD) is a fairly popular education trend that was designed by nationally recognized educators Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe. The emphasis of UbD is on "backward design", the practice of looking at the outcomes in order to design curriculum units, performance assessments, and classroom instruction. Traditionally educators start planning with activities and textbooks and end with an assessment to evaluate the learned skills instead of identifying classroom learning goals and planning towards that goal. In backward design, the teacher starts with classroom outcomes and assessments and then plans the curriculum, choosing activities and materials that help determine student ability and foster student learning. The backward design approach consists of three general stages: Stage 1 - Identifying desired results, Stage 2 - Determining acceptable evidence, Stage 3 - Planning learning experiences and instruction. Stage 1 delineates what the big idea is of understanding and the long and short term goals/objectives. The second stage looks at the assessment and how the desired results will be evaluated. Finally, the third stage seeks to establish meaningful, effective, and engaging learning activities so that the desired goals can be achieved with the necessary guidelines for expected achievement.

Book: McTighe, J. and Wiggins, G. (2004). Understanding by design professional development workbook. Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development .
 * __Information Resources __**

Website: [] - A plethora of resources on UbD.

- Integrating research-based strategies such as Differentiated Instruction and Understanding by Design for addressing individual student readiness levels, learning profiles, and interests  could quite possibly yield the development of purposeful standards-based units that meet all learners’ needs. - UbD benefits the teacher and learner in its characteristic to open up use of other levels of depth of knowledge. In using more areas of cognitive expression, the opportunity to understand at a critical height prevails. On the other hand, although being able to teach for understanding is a primary goal in schooling, there are times when understanding is not tangible or a possibility for that matter. The developmental constraints of students will determine the limit to which conceptualization is appropriate; and at times, it will make in-depth understanding a lesser goal. Another challenge, especially in public schools is the fact that feeder schools may not be using the same curriculum and it wastes time when trying to train students in a new way of thinking. We as educators can’t single handedly change an aspect as such. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px;">- To successfully implement UbD at a feasible level, the teacher must be informed on the population of students being taught as well as the culture and environment that they live in. They must also build a rapport by being empathetic and connecting with them. When valid support is shown then the student will show effort in attempting to gain understanding.
 * __<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Strategies and Ideas for Implementation __**