Transcript What UbD is and what it isn’t

What UbD is and what it isn’t
• A way of thinking
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purposefully about design
A conceptual framework
Priorities center on big
ideas
Design to make
understanding more likely
It’s about the planning
process…
• NOT a prescriptive program
• NOT a step by step guide
• Not guidance about the
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content
NOT a methodology
Not a philosophy of
education
Not a specific strategy
Not a specific assessment
Not against traditional
testing
Not against letter grades
Understanding
by Design
•Backward Design
from long term
goals
Big idea
Big Idea
•Transfer is the
essence of
understanding
and the point of
schooling
• Understanding
is meaning
making not
taught and
acquired
Big Idea
3 Stages of Backward Design
Stage 1: In the end, what should students be
able to do with their learning?
Stage 2: What is valid evidence of their ability
to meet the long-term transfer goals?
Stage 3: What do students need to
learn to develop transfer ability?
3 Stages of Backward Design
Stage 1: In the end, what should students be
able to make sense of on their own?
Stage 2: What is valid evidence of their
ability to achieve such understanding?
Stage 3: What do students need to learn to
develop transfer ability?
What we typically
(incorrectly) do:
Identify content to be acquired
Without checking for
alignment
Brainstorm lessons to learn the content
Without checking for
alignment
Create an assessment to see if they
learned the content
Backward design from the purpose,
not the content
False logic: FIRST learn all the ‘facts’ and
‘skills’ then – much later – learn to use
them
In all arts, crafts, professions, and athletics you
start ‘playing the game’ from the start
The sum of the drills ≠ performance in context
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Six Facets of Understanding
Explain - provide thorough,
supported, and justifiable accounts
of phenomena, facts and data
Interpret - tell meaningful
stories; offer apt translations;
provide a revealing historical or
personal dimension to ideas and
events; make it personal or accessible
through images, anecdotes,
analogies, and models.
Apply - effectively use and
adapt what is known in diverse
contexts.
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(P23)
Perspective - can see and hear
points of view through critical eyes
and ears; see the big picture.
Empathize - find value in
what others might find odd, alien, or
implausible; perceive sensitively on
the basis of prior direct experience.
Self-Knowledge - perceive
the personal style, prejudices, projections,
and habits of mind that both shape and
impede our own understanding; having an
awareness of what one does not
understand and why understanding is so
hard
What is understanding?

Knowledge
◦ The facts
◦ A body of
coherent facts
◦ Verifiable
claims
 I know
something to
be true.
 I respond on
cue with
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8 what I know.
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Understanding
◦ Meaning of the facts
◦ Theory that provides
coherence and meaning to
those facts
◦ Fallible, in-process
theories
◦ A matter of degree or
sophistication
 I understand why it is.
 I judge when to and
when not to use what I
know.
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...for what uses?
Without being taught how to use content ‘tools’
I have no understanding.
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Twin Sins
 Activity oriented design
 Coverage (not purposeful survey)—teaching by mentioning
it.
Activity
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Coverage
UBD Template – AMT based
STAGE 1
Standards
Transfer
Transfer
Meaning
Essential Questions
Understandings
Acquisition
Knowledge
Skill
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Acquisition goals
Learn, with accurate and
timely recall, important facts
and discrete skills
Aim: automaticity of recall
when needed in performance
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Acquisition goals
Know the future tense of estar
Find the slope of a line
Read fluently out loud
Accurately recall key facts on
timeline of World War II
Calculate rate of acceleration
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Authentic Education 2009
Making Meaning: The student
 Making connections
 Finding patterns
 Identifying rules
 Abstracting Principles
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Authentic
Education 2009
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From B. Garner, Getting to Got it!
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Meaning goals
How do I make connections &
formulate generalizations, using the
facts and skills?
e.g. main idea, proof, thesis, critique,
interpretation, etc.
AIM: independent and defensible
inferences about texts, data,
experiences - ‘helpful and insightful
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Making Meaning: Challenge
Understanding by...
 Providing new information that requires a
student to extend the tentative
understanding (broaden and confirm)
 Providing conflicting information
(contradictions-requiring re-thinking)
 Proposing an alternative understanding
(same problem in a new light)
Meaning Making: challenge
understanding by…
 Adding complexity to the issue (confirming and
contradicting)
 Comparing new understanding to previous understandings
about related issues (connect to prior learning and
synthesize)
 Provide a problem that cannot be solved with a naïve
understanding (p 186)
Novice assumes that a logical argument is enough to
persuade. The more informed realizes that to persuade
you have to know your audience.
Meaning Making: challenge
understanding by…
 Requiring a Defense
 By introducing a different perspective that
must be accounted for
 Testing an understanding against a new case
(confirm, contradict or require adjustment)
Transfer Goals
Adapt your knowledge, skill, and
understanding to specific and
realistic situations and contexts
AIM: efficient, effective solutions
for real-world (or realistic)
challenges, audiences, purposes,
settings
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Transfer Goals
 Analyze real-world data to develop a price point
for a bake sale
 Use your understanding of Newton’s Laws to
debug a failed design for a roller coaster
 Given all your reading on ‘friendship’ and your
experience, write a manual on how to be a best
friend
 Navigate your way in Spanish in a simulation of
a busy train station
 Develop an art installation for a specific
institutional client
AMT in Driving
 T: navigate varied real-world driving
conditions, using all your skills, ideas, facts
 M: Correctly and efficiently interpret the
meaning of impending or current
conditions, especially mindful of ‘drive
defensively’
 A: Acquire skills of steering, turning,
braking, etc.; know the laws
AMT in math
T: solve a non-routine and unfamiliar
problem in context in which there may
or may not be a linear relationship
M: Correctly interpret the meaning of
data patterns or line of ‘best fit’ of data
points
A: Acquire skills of plotting point pairs,
accurately drawing the graph of a line
from a linear equation, etc.
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What are the perfect answers:
 1.
What are you learning?
 2. What are you being asked to do?
 3. How is this like something you have already
learned?
 4. What will you do with this?
 5. What will it help you do that really matters?
 6. Why is it important to know this?
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All effective units balance these
three goals
 Acquisition of knowledge and skills
 Ability to consider, connect, infer –
make meaning of challenging
situations, puzzling facts, confusing
texts, problems, etc.
 Transfer of prior learning to new
situations – activating the right
knowledge and skill via understanding
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Authentic Education 2009
That’s how long-term goals are lost
Content is the means; toward what end?
Consider:
Practicing medicine vs. learning the facts of
medicine
Playing jazz vs. the ability to read music
Speaking French effectively vs. learning grammar
and vocabulary
Solving problems on your own vs. learning algebra
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Backward Design from Accomplishments
Sought (Un-coverage of content)
I want students to leave my course having
understood that …
 The Constitution was a solution, based upon
compromise to real and pressing problems and
disagreements in governance. It was not just a ‘nice
idea’ out of thin air.
 It was a brilliant balance and limit of powers, but
grounded in a long and sometimes bitter history, with
many fights that are with us and will always be with
us.
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AND
I want students to transfer that
understanding to…
The problem of designing a
government for Iraq or
establishing a system of
governance for schools.
Structure of Knowledge
principles and
generalizations
key concepts
and core processes
Fairness, slavery,
maturity, evolution,
patterns
Pages
69-80
facts and skills
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Big Ideas:
 Connect the dots
 Make sense of the discrete
knowledge and skills
 Endure
 Require un-coverage
 Provide the “Velcro”
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The acid test for a Big Idea:
Does it
 have lasting value, with transfer to other inquiries?
 serve as a key concept for making important facts, skills,
and actions more connected, coherent, meaningful, useful?
 epitomize “core” (not “basic”) insights in a subject or
discipline?
• require “un-coverage” (since it is an abstract or often-
misunderstood idea)?
PRACTICING BACKWARD DESIGN
 STAGE

1:
My long-term aim is for students to leave my class
having understood that
_____________________________[a big idea - e.g.,
“congruence” “narrative”]
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AND leave my class able to use their prior learning,
to _________________________________________ [a transfer
goal - e.g., “to solve real-world problems” or “to
write engaging and well-argued papers”].
LONG TERM TRANSFER GOAL
I want my students to learn
(big idea)
_____________________________ so
that (in the long run) they
can (on their own)
__________________________
(transfer goal)
Worth
being
familiar
with
General Eating
patterns
Conditions requiring
dietary restrictions
Type of food in each food group
Nutritional values
The USDA Food Pyramid
Food labels
Big Ideas or
Enduring
Understandings
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You are what you eat.
Your diet affects your
health, appearance,
and performance
Important
to know
and do
Stage 1: Enduring Understandings
 The student will understand that…
 A balanced diet contributes to physical and
mental health.
 Healthful living requires an individual to act
on available information about good
nutrition even if it means breaking
comfortable habits.
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Stage 1: Essential Questions
 What is healthful eating?
 How could a healthy diet for one
person be unhealthy for
another?
 Why are there so many health
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problems in the United States
caused by poor eating despite
available information?
Performance Tasks Based on 6 Facets
of Understanding
 Explain (math)
 Study a common phenomenon
 Interpret
 Do a trend analysis of a finite data
 Apply
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(e.g. weather data). Reveal subtle
and easily overlooked patterns in
the data.
set.
 Develop a new statistic for
evaluating the value of a baseball
player in key situations.
6 Facets (math)
Pages 168169
 Perspective  Examine the differences when using
various measures (e.g., mean, median, for
calculating grades)
 Empathy
 Self-
knowledge
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 Read Flatland and a set of letters between
mathematicians explaining why they fear
publishing their findings; write a reflective
essay on the difficulty of explaining new
ideas, even abstract ones.
 Develop a mathematical resume with a
brief description of your intellectual
strengths and weaknesses. P.158
A Collection of Assessment
Evidence
Pages 150-151
Three Types of Classroom Assessments
Stage 3
Assessment for Learning
Diagnostic
Precedes instruction,
checks for prior
knowledge,
misconceptions,
learning preferences
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Provide information to assist
in planning and guiding
instruction (Pre-tests, K-W-L,
Surveys, concept maps)
Stage 2
Assessment of Learning
Formative
Summative
Ongoing assessments
provide information
to guide teaching and
learning
Culminating assessments at
the end of the unit, course, or
grade level to determine
degree of mastery or
proficiency according to
identified achievement targets
Must include formal and informal
methods (quiz, oral questioning,
observation, draft work, “think,
pair, share”, think aloud, dress
rehearsal, portfolio review
Evaluative in nature, generally
resulting in a score or a grade
(test, performance task, final
exam, culminating project or
performance, work portfolio)
Transfer implies autonomous i.e.
independent ability
Over time, the student must be
required to figure out what to do on
their own, then do it: judge, act, selfassess, self-adjust
Both meaning and transfer situations
are inherently ambiguous – they
challenge our understanding and
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Gradual Release of Teacher
Responsibility
I do, you watch
I do, you help
You do, I help
You do, I watch
This is a general schema for the development of
transfer ability at any age, in any subject
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To make meaning of things via
ideas is to...
‘Connect the dots’ Make sense of (seemingly isolated)
experiences, data, or facts
Identify the gist, point, purpose,
significance, big idea
Draw appropriate (but not obvious)
inferences (e.g. motive)
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The need to understand is also
key to engagement
“The
art of holding interest
lies in raising questions and
delaying the answers...”
– David Lodge, The Art of Fiction
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UBD Template – AMT based
STAGE 1
Standards
Transfer
Transfer goal refers to Big Ideas
Meaning
Essential Questions
Understandings
Acquisition
Knowledge
Skills
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State tests demand autonomous
transfer!
Every formal testing situation requires
meaning and transfer!
Consider the needed prior release of
teacher responsibility:
Student gets no hints, scaffold, context clues
Student has to figure out which prior learning is
relevant, with no teacher assistance.
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DO NOT FRONTLOAD
WITH ACQUISITION ACTIVITIES. BEGIN WITH
MAKE MEANING OR TRANSFER.
A quick recap
 What is understanding? P. 23
 Backward planning (138-140)
 Acquisition, make meaning, transfer
 Big Ideas (67-79)
 Transfer goal with a big idea: I want my students to learn
_____ (big idea) so that on their own later on they can
_________.
 Enduring Understandings and Essential Questions (89-111)
 Performance Task (136-207)
 WHERETO (214-226)
WHERETO
pages 214-226
 Do not front load with acquisition
 To hook the learner (begin with make meaning or transfer)
 Give frequent feedback
 Remember the release of responsibility (I do, you watch; I
do, you help; you do, I help; and you do, I watch)
 Allow for self-evaluation