Chapter 9: Planning for Learning

Now that we have established our desired objective in Stage 1, considering the six facets of understandings and that we have selected the appropriate pieces of evidence we will gather to assess our students’ performance in Stage 2, we can start planning the learning activities in Stage 3.

Before designing the activities whereby our students will show understanding, it is important to consider the age of our students and their context. We must ask ourselves “what kinds of instructional approaches, resources, and experiences are required to achieve these goals?” After asking this question, we must design an effective and engaging plan for learning. Engaging because it must challenge students, foster critical thinking and make them be motivated to participate in the lesson. Effective because it help students be competent and productive. This plan for learning must be above all meaningful.

After undertaking a couple of workshops to find out the most effective activities to plan for learning, the book shows a list of common characteristics, including real-life challenges, variety of tasks, meaningful feedback, safe environment to mention a few. In order to provide a better design tool which includes all the main features a good learning plan must have, the authors of UbD put all these elements together in the acronym WHERETO which helps teachers: ensure the students Where the unit is going and Why, Hook and Hold students' attention, Equip students with knowledge, tools and experiences, provide their students opportunities to Rethink big ideas, Reflect and Revise their work, give their students opportunities to Evaluate their progress, create Tailored tasks and activities to highlight individual talents, styles and interests and be Organized to optimize deep understanding.

With this design tool, we can see how stage 1 can be translated into meaningful opportunities for our students to reach the desired objective and how all the previous elements in stage 1 and 2, such as six facets of understanding, essential questions, knowledge, skills, evidence and rubrics meet to create a really good learning plan.

I cannot offer my perspective in this matter because I have not used this tool before. Nevertheless, I can say that this leaves nothing to chance. Teachers and students can feel safe because lessons and objectives are well thought and designed, reducing the possibilities of confusion, misunderstandings, gaps or dangerous improvisation. There are no excuses. I only have to sit and think of what enduring understandings I expect my students to have.

Chapter 8: Criteria and Validity

In line with Stage 2 of UbD Template, chapter 8 offers us the two other elements to be considered when planning evidence from performance. First, we must consider the criteria and rubrics by which our students will be assessed and second we must verify if the evidence matches our established goals. In order to do so, we must establish “independent variables in the performance”. This means different criteria we will focus on when assessing our students’ performance.

Rubrics are a scoring guide based on different and independent criteria. Rubrics describe each criterion or characteristic to be assessed. According to the chapter, there are two general types of rubrics: Holistic and analytic.  The most used and also recommended by UbD is the analytic rubric because it provides our students’ a better quality of feedback, a less subjective; more comprehensive and more reliable feedback. The book also suggests that building and revising a rubric also depends on an analysis of student performance. In this chapter, we can find meaningful examples and also real rubrics and criteria to prepare our own assessment planning, using the six facets of understandings.

From my personal point of view, one of the unnatural things about UbD is the fact that I must write and establish the criteria before defining the task to be assessed. This part of UbD has been really difficult to understand. I think it does not make sense to me. Not yet. Besides, I fully understand that the first step to help our students improve their performance and thus their understanding of a subject is by providing them effective, clear, appropriate and pertinent feedback. However, considering my forty-student classroom, it is difficult to assess them all and by using different methods or formats as suggested in chapter seven, because the time does not allow for it. I should probably resort to self-assessment and peer review.

Chapter 7: Thinking like an Assessor

In chapter seven we go in depth into stage 2 of UbD Template. Once we have specified the objective, something natural for most teachers involves designing the learning activities. However, first we must establish what we can consider as valid and reliable evidence and how we are going to assess that evidence. Stage 2 will provide us all the elements that we need to take into consideration when gathering our students’ evidence for assessment.

According to the book, in stage 2 of UbD Template we must ask ourselves three main questions in order to think like an assessor. I summarized those questions in statements: what types of performances we must consider as evidence, by which criteria and rubrics we will assess our students and finally we must verify if the evidence matches our established goals. Chapter seven reviews only the first statement.

This chapter invites us to gather several pieces of evidence through the unit using different formats or methods instead of applying just one test to assess our students. This evidence could include oral questions, observations, dialogues; traditional quizzes, tests, and open ended prompts; and performance tasks and projects. Besides, evidence must be authentic and contextualized. Students must have the opportunity to apply their knowledge, to connect with their own experiences in real-life problems in order to acquire enduring understanding. This chapter also provides us the GRASPS design tool. This acronym has been created to help teachers in their task design. The letters mean Goal, Role, Audience, Situation, Performance, Standard. This useful design tool will help teacher ensure the authenticity of tasks.

Something that caught my attention and I agree with is the fact that we can improve assessment through the use of self-assessment and peer review. Besides assessing, we will be developing other social skills like work group and self-reflection.

I must admit that once I have established the learning goal I make the common mistake related to engagement. I start immediately to create the learning activities without paying attention to think what kind of evidence would be most suitable for the goal. This will require a real change of mind. 

Chapter 6: Crafting Understanding

In this chapter, the author takes us deeper into the complex meaning of understanding. Understandings are transferable, abstract and not obvious; they are generalizations and big ideas. The author wants us understand that without leading our students to inquiry, we are just making misunderstandings persist. This can be originated if we only focus on content. The book uses the word “uncoverage” to show one way to teach for understanding. Unpacking misunderstandings is a clever and practical form of creating enduring understandings.   

To better understand what an enduring understanding is, the book provides us a couple of connotations of the term. First, an enduring understanding is the one that remains over time because it is important and meaningful. Second, an enduring understanding is the one that stay in our students’ minds. Through these last six chapters, the book has been narrowing what an understanding is and what we are supposed to design to reach the desired learning objective.

Most of the time understandings are framed as full-sentence propositions. In my particular case, it has been very helpful to finish the sentence “Students should understand that…” because it allows me to remember about what I am going to write, so I can keep in mind what I want my students take home. Thus I have more opportunities to create a meaningful proposition and an enduring understanding.

I work with elementary students and I really connected with the part in which the author explains that essential questions, facts and understandings will depend on who the learners are and what their previous experiences are. I have to always be aware of context, specially in my case.

Reading this book has been a complete self-reflection journey. I now understand that I must make lots of changes in my teaching practice. I must give my students space to consider, propose, test, question, criticize and verify, because an enduring understanding must be always investigated.

Chapter 5: Essential Questions: Doorways to Understanding

We have seen so far that our aim through UbD is to make our students reach a deep, meaningful and complete understanding of the learning objective we have so carefully designed. However, besides objectives, knowledge and understanding, we need something to connect all the elements together and at the same time we need something to make our students feel engaged in this lesson, topic or unit. One of the ways in which we can engage our students in learning a subject is through asking questions. But not any questions, we must think of meaningful questions. Essential questions serve as doorways to allow our students to make connections, to recall prior knowledge and own experiences. They have as ultimate goal to make our students ask more questions and to encourage our students to go beyond on the way to finding answers or to fully understanding the topic. Essential questions must lead to inquiry.

Furthermore, these questions need to be contextualized. Students must see and understand the relationship between their lives and the topic. They must find these questions genuine and relevant to them. However, once again, it is not an easy task. The book explains the four meanings of “essential” and also explains the differences between overarching, leading, guided and topical questions and the relevance of all of them.

Self-reflecting about this chapter, I realized that I do not use essential questions at all in my lessons. Probably I felt discouraged due to my students’ low level of English. Or I had not considered the importance of asking my students these types of questions. However, I must understand that this is really essential task if I want my students explain, interpret, apply, have perspective, show empathy and develop self-knowledge.

Chapter 4 The Six Facets of Understanding

The aim of this chapter is to make us be aware of the different stages of Understanding in order to facilitate and better assess our students’ learning process. If we as teachers want to reach a thorough and deep teaching for transfer, we must be able to recognize and develop all of these six facets of understanding, which are: Explain, Interpret, Apply, Perspective, Empathy and Self-Knowledge. Once we recognize and understand the objective of each of them, we will be able to design the appropriate task for our students in order to give them the proper feedback to promote their intellectual and social growth.

Explain: We must ensure that our students make inferences, connections and associations.

Interpret: We must ensure that our students make sense of their lives through stories and data.

Apply: We must allow our students to put knowledge into practice through authentic assignments.

Perspective: We must provide explicit opportunities to make our students think critically.

Empathy:  We must help our students see from inside the person’s worldview.

Self-Knowledge: We must facilitate and assess our students’ self-reflection process.

We must remember that we are teaching students to make them become autonomous learners. We must give them space to make inferences, to develop interpretations; we must create authentic tasks to make them use their knowledge in real context and opportunities to make them confront different points of view and perspectives. We must help our students respect other’s points of views and above all, we must contribute with our students’ self-awareness and self-reflection. We want our students really “understand” and not only memorize facts and data. They must be able to make connections with their own realities

Now I try to look inside and discover if I have been able to allow my students to do all the aforementioned. At this stage, I am not quite sure, so I have to continue self-reflecting and analyzing. Again, it is a tough work. Now that I think about this, I believe that this book is making us apply all what we have studied through this MA, interesting...

Chapter 3 Gaining Clarity on Our Goals: “With no long-term goals, there is no perspective”

In Chapter 3 of UbD, the author wants us to understand the relevance of our decisions when designing the learning objectives. These objectives will vary depending on the nature of the target (such as state content standards, school goals and the like). In order to collaborate with the decision-making process about what to teach, what to emphasize and what to discard, this chapter provides a general description of Stage 1 of UbD Template to help us identify the desired results. Another aim of this template is to avoid the two common mistakes among teachers: to plan activity-centered lessons and content-based lessons. In this template, we can find five important elements to design and define goals: Established Goals, Understandings, Essential Questions, Knowledge and Skills. Each of these will contribute to prioritize and build the goal.

I found very interesting the importance of unpacking standards to reach the big ideas and take advantage of them to define the desired learning goals. However, what are big ideas? How can we recognize them and finally reach them? Most of big ideas are abstract and not obvious. The book offers information about how to reach these big ideas.

Another thing that caught my attention was the fact that in Chile we have the same problem described in the book related to content: too much to cover in no time. That is something we must work on. Furthermore, we must be aware of the perspective of stage 1 of the template. It intends to transfer the teachers’ perspectives and not the learners’ perspectives.

Once I recognized the value of UbD, I have tried to apply this learning into my daily teaching practice. I have tried to establish concrete, clear and coherent objectives for my students. I have to admit that it is not an easy task but it is a worthy one. Now that I recall, I can say that probably some of my students already have what can make them be better adults or better human beings in the future. I really hope so. 

Chapter 2 Understanding Understanding: “Going beyond the information given”

At the end of the previous summary I expressed how confused I felt with the word “understanding”. Well, Chapter 2 offers the reader an interesting analysis and examples to support the meaning of “understanding” and “knowledge”. Understanding is the ability to infer messages, to apply facts, to transfer what I learned to new and different situations and to judge when to use and when no to use what I know. Bruner’s famous phrase expresses it properly: “going beyond the information given”. By the other hand, knowledge is a set of facts, skills and procedures that can be learned by heart. We need knowledge to have understanding. We need concrete facts before applying them in new settings. Even though both terms can be used interchangeably, it is necessary to understand the difference. This chapter also provides information related to student misunderstanding and how helpful this could be if we learn from it. In fact, this chapter teaches us that student’s misunderstandings are the result of an unsuccessful transfer of understanding and not the lack of knowledge.

I found quite interesting what Whitehead expressed about “inert ideas”: “Education with inert ideas is not only useless it is above all things harmful”. When a teacher tries to cover many contents, the result will probably be like this one. We must pay attention to inert ideas in order to avoid negative consequences. 

I always say that I want my students to be autonomous learners and I realized that I haven’t probably well understood this concept until now. Students can become autonomous learners if we teach them how to learn on their own. This implies to teach them how to transfer understanding to real-life situations. On the contrary, teachers reteach old contents. I think of the last test I wrote and I realized that I have only measured my students’ learning ability to memorize. Another big challenge to overcome.

I was trying to think how I can make my students apply the previous knowledge to check their understanding. The solution is probably right in front of our eyes. When introducing a new learning objective, we must give some opportunities to make our students apply what they’ve learned in previous lessons but in a completely different context.

Now I will wait for Chapter 7 to discover “core tasks”. Apparently the book will provide evidence to create new ways of testing and assessing students with the objective of helping them to develop abilities to extract understandings and apply them in different settings. We have a real challenge not only to design for understanding but also to assess for understanding.

Understanding by Design: Introduction and Chapter 1

“Teachers are designers” is the starting point for Chapter 1 of this book “Understanding by Design” that purports to provide a new perspective for transferring understandings to students while empowering teachers to actually create and “design” the way their students will achieve the desired learning results. With that powerful sentence, this book introduces a totally brand new method to design teaching lessons. UbD gives a clear description to convince teachers that they can effectively focus on better student performance, which is at the end, the purpose of design. Teachers can have an appealing idea about the contents of the book, the varied and “intelligent” tools it offers and how effective the final product will be if teachers follow three essential stages: Identify desired results, determine acceptable evidence and plan learning experiences and instructions.

UbD is friendly and quite easy to read. However, to put it into practice is a real challenge even if I consider that I have practiced one of the twin sins described in the book. I realized that I am an activity-centered teacher. Most of the times I focus on finding funny activities instead of setting clear learning objectives. Besides the previous fact, another important point caught my attention: the idea of thinking about the assessments before deciding what and how I will teach. This is far from my common practice. For this purpose, the templates included in the book are a wonderful tool to make the correct questions before designing objectives, assessments and learning activities. Finally, I think that UbD gives a great opportunity to collaborative work because it fosters peer review and professional development aiming quality control and improvement.

Now that I have to design units for my students from 4^th to 7^th grade, I will try to do it using “backward design”. Nonetheless, I feel just as confused as Bob James…asking myself what understanding really is in this context…I will continue reading and then I will tell you if I got the answer.