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.