Understanding by design

UNDERSTANDING BY DESIGN

CNG, September 27, 2010

Introduce and discuss the 3 stages of Understanding by Design (also known as Backward Design because you begin with the end in mind)

Practice creating Enduring Understandings and Essential Questions

Goals / Objectives

In your groups, please generate a list in two minutes or less that encapsulates what you know about the topic you are given

Activating Prior Knowledge

Differentiation of Instruction

Content—What you teach Process—How you teach it Product—How you assess what you

taught Student Interest Student Readiness Student Interest

Assessment FOR Learning

Balanced approach to assessment Formative—ongoing with consistent,

specific feedback; informs future teaching Summative—culminating with specific

feedback and guidance for future learning Using a variety of assessment practices

Performance Assessments Authentic experiences that require

application of learning in meaningful ways for a particular audience

CNG Assessment Beliefs

Assessment takes a variety of formsincluding self assessment, informal observation, projects, performance tasks and portfolios, oral responses and reports, short constructed responses, essays, forced choice items, amongst others.

Teachers should inform students in advance of content, concepts and skills that will be addressed in assessments.

CNG Assessment Beliefs

The type of test/assessment used to assess learning should be developmentally appropriate and determined by the nature of the learning outcomes and the types of learners being assessed.

In order to maximize learning, feedback on assessments is both specific and timely.

CNG Assessment Beliefs

It is invaluable for educators to collaboratively reflect on students’ work/learning in order to reflect upon instructional decisions and practices.

Assessment is inseparably linked to instruction. Everything that is assessed is taught and is in the curriculum.

Effective assessment improves student learning, and the more we know about our students, the better teachers we become.

New Information

Understanding by Design:Backward Design Process

Stage One: Identifying Desired Results Enduring Understandings Essential Questions Standards and Benchmarks

Stage Two: Determining Acceptable Evidence of Learning Assessment-Formative and Summative Valid, reliable, sufficient, and feasible

Stage Three: Planning Learning Experiences and Instruction Activities Resources

Understanding by Design:Connection to Differentiation of Instruction

Stage One: Content (and Skills)—What we teach

Stage Two: Product (Assessment)—How we know

students have learned what we’ve taught

Stage Three: Process—How we teach…instructional

strategies and grouping

Applying New Information

Unit Plans and UbD

Consider a unit/theme that you will do this year and identifying the Stages: One (Desired Results), Two (Acceptable Evidence) and Three (Instructional Plan).

Is anything missing? If so, what? How might you address or augment?

Identifying Desired Results

Stage One

What do you think this means? Spend a minute thinking independently or talking with a neighbor. Jot down your ideas…

Enduring Understandings

Enduring Understandings

Jay McTighe:Think about the words “enduring understanding.” Enduring: What do you want to last and why? Five years from now after the kids forget all the details, after the quiz or the test, what do you hope they will still understand? Eight years from now, what do you want them to be able to do with knowledge and skills that you have taught? That is the idea of enduring.

Enduring Understandings

Transferable big ideas Phrased as declarative sentences Designed to promote student

connections, insights, and applications Specific enough to guide teaching and

assessing Framed by provocative Essential and

Unit Questions Students will understand that…

Sample Enduring Understandings Scientific knowledge develops through carefully

controlled investigations Authors do not always say exactly what they

mean and mean exactly what they say Great artists often break with established

traditions, conventions and techniques to better express what they see and feel

A president is not above the law

Applying New Information

Enduring UnderstandingsYour Turn…Consider a unit and develop a few

1. Represent enduring and transferable big ideas that have value beyond the classroom.

2. Express big ideas and core processes at the heart of a discipline or content area.

3. Help unpack abstract, counterintuitive, often or easily misunderstood ideas requiring uncoverage. 

4. Help reveal the big ideas embedded in facts, skills, and activities.

What do you think this means? Spend a minute thinking independently or talking with a neighbor. Jot down your ideas…

Essential Questions

Essential Questions

Jay McTighe:We like to frame big ideas around essential questions. An essential question is a question that serves as a doorway for exploring a big idea, for uncovering the content. And, therefore, a good essential question typically doesn’t have a single correct answer, [and] is a question that is debated and discussed in the field today, a question that can be fruitfully revisited again and again. And as we revisit the question, often we go deeper and develop a refined understanding of the topic.

Unit QuestionsPlease choose one to answer on your own…

1. What is the definition of history?2. What artists are culturally significant in

Colombia (or any country you choose) this decade?

3. How does the partial products algorithm work?4. What are the main ideas of the story The

Princess and the Pea?5. What are the three most commonly broken

laws?6. What are Newton’s laws of gravity?7. What traits did you inherit from your parents?

Moving from Unit Questions to Essential Questions

Essential Questions are: Open-ended, interpretive questions Go to the heart of your content Promote student inquiry, investigation,

and debate

Essential Questions

1. Is history a history of progress?2. Does art reflect culture or shape it?3. Are mathematical ideas inventions or

discoveries?4. Must a story have a beginning, middle,

and end?5. When is a law unjust?6. Is gravity a fact or a theory?7. Is biology destiny?

Unit vs. Essential Questions Provide subject and

topic specific doorways to Essential Questions

Frame particular content and inquiry

Should provoke and sustain engagement of students

Often lead to the essential questions

Are open ended with a variety of possible answers

Provoke thought, discussion and often raise other important questions

Should provoke and sustain engagement of students

Lead students to the enduring understanding of the unit

Essential Qs Unit Qs What is light? How do cats see in the dark?

Is light a particle or a wave?

Is U.S. history a history of progress?

Is the gap between rich and poor any better now than it was 100 years ago?Do new technologies always lead to progress?

Who is a friend? Are Frog and Toad true friends?Has it been true in recent U.S. history that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend?”

Must a story have a moral, heroes, and villains?

What is the moral of the story of the Holocaust?Is Huck Finn a hero?

Applying New Information

Your turn…Essential Questions

1. They have no one obvious right answer.

2. They raise other important questions, often across subject-area boundaries.

3. They address the philosophical or conceptual foundations of a discipline.

4. They recur naturally.

5. They are framed to provoke and sustain student interest.

Essential Questions…Other thoughts

Use a reasonable number of questions per unit (two to four). Make less be more. Prioritize content for students to make the work clearly focus on a few key questions.

Edit the questions to make them as engaging and provocative as possible for the particular age group. Frame the questions in "kid language" as appropriate.

Through a survey or informal check, ensure that every child understands the questions and sees their value.

Derive and design specific concrete exploratory activities and inquiries for each question.

Essential Questions…Other thoughts

Post the overarching questions in the classroom, and encourage students to organize notebooks around them to emphasize their importance for study and note taking.

Help students personalize the questions. Encourage them to share examples, personal stories, and hunches, and to bring clippings and artifacts to class to help the questions come alive.

Standards and Benchmarks

Standards and Benchmarks

CNG curriculum revision process has generated Standards and Benchmarks for all core curriculum areas.

In ES we selected 3-6 per subject - to focus on in our planning, teaching, assessments and reporting out for trimester 1.

Enduring Understandings and Essential Questions flesh out & deepen St/Bm content/concepts/skills.

Determining Acceptable Evidence

Stage Two

Assessment

Stage Two: Determining Acceptable Evidence aka: ASSESSMENT

Valid and reliable measures of targeted understandings

Sufficient information to support inferences about each student’s learning

Opportunities for students to exhibit their understandings through authentic performance tasks

Atlas Rubicon provides a drop down menu that attaches each assessment to standards and benchmarks already chosen for the unit

Planning Learning Experiences and Instruction

Stage Three

Activities

Your instructional plans

Students know where they are going and why (knowledge of unit goals, performance requirements and evaluative criteria)

Students are engaged in digging into the big ideas of the unit (through inquiry, research, problem solving, and experimentation)

Students receive explicit instruction on the knowledge and skills needed to equip them for the required performances

Students have opportunities to rehearse, revise, and refine their work based on feedback

Students self-assess and set goals prior to the conclusion of the unit

Resources

Resources

Textbooks & Teacher Editions Handouts Websites Student exemplars Teacher exemplars Rubrics List of materials

A final thought…

A key challenge in teaching for understanding is to make the student's view of knowledge and coming-to-know more sophisticated by revealing the problems, controversies, and assumptions that lie behind much given and seemingly unproblematic knowledge. The work that teachers design should demonstrate to students that there is always a need to make sense of content knowledge through inquiries and applications—to get beyond dutiful assimilation to active reflection, testing, and meaning making.

Generalizations

Exit Slip

Please reflect on what you’ve learned just now specifically related to Enduring Understandings and Essential Questions.

Share one or two big ideas you are leaving with today. Share one question you still have.

-Understanding by Design PD-Julie Hunt

ES Principal

Sept. 27/10