Understanding by Backwards Design is a concept that NPC has been talking a lot about in the past year or so. The premise was first proposed in 1998 by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe who define their planning style as, "a framework for designing curriculum units, performance assessments, and instruction that lead your students to deep understanding of the content you teach." (Wiggins, G. and McTighe, J. (nd) Understanding by Design: A brief introduction. Center for Technology & School Change at Teachers College, Columbia University. Retrieved 6/7/07.)
My PD focus for the 2014-15 school year has been to examine the ideas of this planning style and work to begin implementation of the concepts into my own teaching. I am thankful that we have a mentorship relationship with several teachers from the Lord Selkirk Regional Comprehensive Secondary School. Selkirk Comp has been travelling the UbD road for several years and has two dedicated teaching positions to mentor LSRCSS staff in learning about and implementing UbD.
According to Greg Schettler and Linda Bjornson, implementing UbD involves a great deal of planning... 1. Start with your worst unit in one course. Revise how you teach it using the UbD concepts. See for yourself the results. 2. Transfer those ideas to another unit, and then another. They caution however, that to do justice to your planning UbD cannot be done for an entire course at one time. I look forward to learning more about this style of planning and implementing it into my own teaching and planning practice. |
Lesson Planning through UbD...
1. Identify desired results. - Essential Questions form the point of inquiry. They should... be arguable, lead to more questions, require evidence and justification, connect to learning experiences, relate to the entire unit. 2. Determine acceptable evidence. - Identify the performance based tasks that will demonstrate learning. They should... reflect real-world contexts, demands, problems or situations, as well as the six facets of understanding (explanation, interpretation, application, perspective, empathy, & self-understanding). Always check the validity of this assessment tool - can students guess or make it 'pretty' without really understanding it? 3. Plan learning experiences and instruction. - WHERETO (why, hook, equip, rethink, evaluate, tailor, organize) |
Rubric Creation... Use beginning, approaching, meeting and exceeding expectations as your rubric categories. Useful verbs for each category are:
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Topic:
Essential Questions:
Essential Questions:
Pre-Assessment
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Formative Assessment
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Formative Assessment
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Formative Assessment
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Formative Assessment
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Summative Assessment
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Summative Assessment
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Summative Assessment
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