Understanding by Design Overview: Planning for Learning

1. Understanding by Design Overview:Planning for Learning Westmoreland Intermediate Unit March 16, 2010

2. To begin with the end in mind means to start with a clear understanding of your destination. It means to know where you’re going so that you better understand where you are now so that the steps you take are always in the right direction. Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

3. Getting to the BIG IDEASThree Circle Audit: Content Priorities

4. Vignette For 2 weeks every Fall, all 3rd graders participate in a unit on apples. They engage in a variety of activities relate to the topic. In language arts, they read about Johnny Appleseed and view an animated filmstrip. They each write a creative story involving an apple and illustrate it using tempera paints. In art, students collect leaves from apple trees and make a giant leaf-print collage. In science, they use their senses to describe the characteristics of different types of apples. During math, the teacher demonstrates how to scale up an applesauce recipe to make enough for all 3rd graders. A highlight of the unit is a trip to a local apple orchard. The culminating activity is an Apple Fest and rotating through various station activities related to apples. The fest concludes with students reading their apple stories which the whole group enjoys candy apples prepared by the cafeteria staff.

5. Twin sins of curriculum design • Activity-focused teaching: -hands-on without ‘minds-on’ - engaging experiences that lead only accidentally, if at all, to insight or achievement -lacks a specific focus on important ideas -lacks appropriate evidence of learning It is not just about engagement. Learning activity Learning comes as the result of considering the meaning of the activity.

6. Vignette It’s late April and the panic is beginning to set in. A quick calculation reveals to the world history teacher that he will not finish the textbook unless he covers an average of 40 pages per day until the end of school. He decides, with some regret, to eliminate a short unit on Latin America and several time-consuming activities, such as a mock UN date and vote and discussions of current international events in relation to the world history topics they’ve studied. To prepare his students for the department final exam, it will be necessary to switch into a fast-forward lecture mode.

7. Twin Sins of curriculum design • Coverage-focused teaching: traverse as much factual material as possible within a prescribed time ----no overarching goals inform the learning experience

8. Content Standards are the goals, not text coverage. Use the textbook as a resource ---not the syllabus!

9. Search for Meaning (understanding) Students ask. . . What’s the point? What’s the big idea here? Why do I need to know this? Why is this going to help me?

10. Search for meaning (understanding) Students in the classroom should be able to answer. . . What are you doing? Why are you being asked to do it? What will it help you do? How does it fit with what you have previously done? How will you show that you have learned it?

11. Where we really want to be. . . How do we make it more likely by our teaching design that more students really understand what they are asked to learn? What do we mean when we say we want students to understand as opposed to merely take in and recall?

12. Examples Social Studies Unit Geometry

13. Understanding by Design A different way of thinking about curriculum, assessment and instruction.

14. UbD: BIG IDEAs for Today • 3 Circle Audit • Backward Design • Big Ideas • Teaching for Understanding • Transfer of Learning

15. It is about ‘Backward Design’ The ‘shift’. . . Involves thinking, A LOT, about the specific learnings or results and the evidence of these learnings BEFORE thinking about what we will do in teaching and learning activities.

16. Stage 1 – Identify Desired Results • What are the established goals? • What ‘big ideas’ do we want students to come to understand? • What essential questions will stimulate inquiry? • What knowledge and skills need to be acquired given the understandings and related content standards? What focus questions will guide students to targeted knowledge and skills?

17. What’s The Big Idea?

18. Where are the Big Ideas? Unpack the Content Standards. What ‘Big Ideas’ are embedded within the standards?

19. Understanding by Design:Stage 1. Big Ideas Is it a big idea? Does it – Have lasting value/transfer to other inquiries? Serve as a key notion for making knowledge, skills, and acts more coherent, meaningful and useful? Lie at the heart of the subject or discipline? Require ‘uncoverage’ to problem solve or explore an abstract or misunderstood idea?

20. Understanding by Design:Stage 1. Examples – Big Ideas Concepts: migration, function, equity, irony Themes: “Good triumphs over evil” Debates: ‘nature vs. nurture’; ‘offense vs. defense Perspective: baby boomers vs. generation ‘X’ Paradox: freedom involves responsibility (ethics/civics) Theory: Newton’s laws, form follows function Principle: free market as self regulating (economics); less is more (design, arts) Assumption: ‘Occam’s Razor’ (parsimony in the sciences)

21. Structure of Knowledge BIG IDEAS! Facts and skills Key concepts & Core processes Generalizations & Principles

22. Factual Knowledge Includes. . . • Vocabulary/terminology • Definitions • Key factual information • Critical details • Important events and people • Sequence/timeline

23. Skills Includes. . . • Basic skills – e.g., decoding, drawing • Communication skills – e.g., listening, speaking, writing • Thinking skills – e.g., comparing • Study skills – e.g., note taking • Interpersonal, group skills

24. Concepts –Transferable ‘big ideas’ Examples. . . adaptation justice change migration energy patterns exploration power freedom symbol interaction systems

25. Principles and Generalizations Examples . . . • Democratic governments must balance rights of individuals with the common good. • Correlation does not ensure causality. • Creating space away from the ball increases scoring opportunities (e.g., in soccer, football, basketball)

26. Adding Up the Facts: Important to Know • Many pioneers, especially children, died from disease • Much hard work was required to settle new land—clearing fields, constructing shelter • The pioneers had to grow, or hunt for, their food. Often, they went hungry. • Settlers faced attacks by Native American tribes on whose lands they traveled or settled.

27. Stage 1: Desired Results – Content Priority BIG IDEA The pioneers faced many hardships in the settlement of the West.

28. adaptation ‘Big Idea’ Understanding Living organisms have developed adaptive mechanisms to enable them to survive in harsh environments.

29. World literature ‘Big Idea’ Understanding Great literature from various cultures explores enduring themes and reveals recurrent aspects of the human condition.

30. Artistic expression ‘Big Idea’ Understanding Available tools and technologies influence the ways in which artists express their ideas

31. Stage 1: Desired Results How do the Big Ideas translate into enduring understandings?

32. Understanding UbD Participants will understanding that. . . • Effective curriculum design evolves backward from clear goals and is aligned across desired results, assessment evidence, and learning plan. • Understanding by Design is a way of thinking more carefully about curriculum design • Using design standards improves quality of teaching and learning

33. The word ‘understand’

34. How we use the word understand • He didn’t understand the French speaker. • I don’t understand you; why did you do that? • Don’t dip the dog’s tail in the paint! Do you understand me? • Men just don’t understand women! • Although I disagree, I can understand the opposition’s point of view. • She knows the answer but doesn’t understand why it is correct.

35. Understanding Understanding Knowledge • The facts • A body of coherent facts • Verifiable claims • Right or wrong • I know something to be true • I respond on cue with what I know Understanding • The meaning of the facts • The’theory’ that provides coherence and meaning to those facts • Fallible, in-process theories • A matter of degree or sophistication • I understand why it is, what makes it knowledge • I judge when to and when not to use what I know

36. Understanding Understanding • Understanding involves meeting a challenge for thought • Understanding is about transfer ---Big Ideas provide the basis for transfer to occur ---transfer involves figuring out what knowledge and skills matter in this situation and adapting them to address the challenge at hand • Understanding, therefore, involves uncoveringthe value of concepts as a result of inquiry

37. From Big Ideas to Understanding Understanding is about transfer. What is transfer and why does it matter? Being able to take what we learned in one lesson and apply it to other, related but different situations. It involves pattern recognition and knowing the big ideas that provide the basis for the transfer. Knowledge and skills are necessary elements for understanding, but not sufficient in themselves. Transfer involves figuring out which knowledge and skill matters here and often adapting what we know to address the challenge at hand.

38. Identify Desired Results UNDERSTANDINGS – Are deliberately framed as generalizations – ‘the moral of the story.’ BIG IDEAS - - - Provide the VELCRO for building understanding.

39. Learning and Cognition Learning depends on 3 dominant brain functions: • An innate search for meaning and purpose when learning • An ongoing connection between emotion and cognition • An innate predisposition to find patterns in the learning environment beginning with wholes rather than parts

40. Learning and Cognition Learning is heavily situated; student’s application and transfer of learning to new situations and contexts does not occur automatically.

41. Learning and Cognition “The tests must involve situations new to the student. . .Ideally we are seeking a problem which will test the extent to which the individual has learned to apply an abstraction [a big idea] in a practical way.” Benjamin Bloom

42. How do you know when a student understands something? They are able to. . . Explain it Interpret it Apply it in different situations Develop insightful points of view Identify with another’s world view Examine their own patterns of thought

43. 6 Facets of Understanding Explanation Interpretation Application Perspective Empathy Self-Knowledge

44. Sample Understandings • Great artists often break with established conventions and techniques to better express what they see and feel. • Price is a function of supply and demand. • Friendships can be deepened or undone by hard times. • History is the story told by the ‘winners.’ • Might does not make right • Math models simplify physical relations – and even sometimes distort relations – to deepen our understanding of them • Everyone holds membership in a variety of groups

45. Understanding by Design:Understandings Examples of Understandings • An effective story engages the reader by setting up tensions – through questions, mysteries, dilemmas, uncertainties – about what will happen next. • When liquid water disappears, it turns into water vapor and can reappear as liquid if the air is cooled. • Correlation does not ensure causality Nonexamples of Understandings • Audience and purpose • Water covers three-fourths of the earth’s surface • Things are always changing

46. UbD: Stage 1 Enduring Understandings or ‘Big Ideas’ are complete sentences or recommendations that students will understand that __________. Completing the full understanding brings conceptual clarity.

47. Understandings Misunderstandings – An understanding is a non-obvious generalization about a big idea. • It cannot be adequately understood by being stated! “Coverage” and mentioning will not yield insight into the unobvious or abstract. • An understanding is an inference that requires inquiry and student ‘construction’ if it is to be understood • We must anticipate likely student misunderstandings – by design.

48. Anticipate Misunderstandings

49. Stage 1. Desired Results Essential Questions

50. Essential Questions Understanding by Design • Why are the best curriculum designs backward? • Why teach for understanding? • How will we know if students really understand? • What is the difference between understanding and knowing?