"UNDERSTANDING BY DESIGN" by Wiggins and McTighe

"Understanding by Design (UbD) is a framework for designing curriculum units, performance assessments, and instruction that lead your students to deep understanding of the content you teach.

Each component of the UbD program builds your understanding of the framework and helps you apply it in your classroom and school."

Source: ASCD For the Success of Each Learner

In this page you will find a brief description of the content in the book "Understanding by Design."  This is a support page designed to help you with the most important information you must know in order to apply this important resource tool in your classroom.

Understanding:

• Explanation: provide thorough and justifiable accounts of phenomena, facts, and data

• Interpretation: tell meaningful stories, offer apt translations, provide a revealing historical or personal dimension to ideas and events; make subjects personal or accessible through images, anecdotes, analogies, and models

• Application: effectively use and adapt what they know in diverse contexts. Experiment with the information they have learned

• Perspective: see and hear points of view through critical eyes and ears; see the big picture

• Empathy: find value in what others might find odd, alien, or implausible; perceive sensitively on the basis of prior indirect experience

• Self-knowledge: perceive the personal style, prejudices, projections, and habits of mind that both shape and impede our own understanding; they are aware of what they do not understand and why understanding is so hard

Backward Design Process:

• Identify Desired Results
  - Enduring Understanding
  - Essential Questions
  - Knowledge and Skills

• Determine Acceptable Evidence
  - Performance Task
  - Quizzes, Tests, Prompts
  - Unprompted Evidence
  - Student Self-Assessment

• Plan he Learning Experience and Instructions
  - Ask questions: Where we are? What we are doing? Why we are doing it?
  - Hook the Student
  - Equip the Student
  - Rethink
  - Evaluate

Refinement Methods:

• Self-Assessment

• Peer Review

• Field Testing

• Ongoing Revision

• Online Exchange

Source: Instructional Design Intensive Workshop

Resources:

• UB-TAH Lesson Plan Template

• A Brief Power Point Presentation

• A second Power Point Presentation

• Template for Understanding by design Units

• Understanding by Design Support

• TTL Academics and Understanding by Design

• Developing Goals and Objectives

• Multiple Methods of Assessments

• Authentic Education

• Jordan History Academy of Teachers (Excellent Video Strategies)

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