Week One
Differentiated Instruction (DI) and Understanding by Design (UbD) - The Basics
Understanding by Design: A Summary of Key Principles
Understanding by Design is the brainchild of Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe,
two internationally recognized experts in the field of curriculum, assessment,
and teaching for understanding. Wiggins and McTighe emphasize that Understanding
by Design is a framework, not an educational program. They have attempted to
distill the best practices and the research-driven design principles associated
with teaching and assessing for understanding. Their work speaks to educators
who know, either from experience or from intuition, that discrete, disconnected
instruction focused on traditional drill-and-kill approaches is guaranteed to
produce little, if any, genuine learning or deep conceptual understanding among
their students. Educators who have worked extensively with the Wiggins and McTighe
framework almost universally acknowledge its commonsense recommendations for:
(1) unpacking curriculum standards;
(2) emphasizing students' understanding, not just formulaic recall;
(3) expanding assessment tools and repertoires to create a varied portfolio of student achievement instead of a snapshot; and
(4) incorporating the best of what current research tells us about teaching for understanding (including differentiated instruction) to meet the needs of all learners.
There are 10 major design principles at the heart of the Wiggins and McTighe
framework:
1. Research tells us that students learn actively, not passively.
Educators should consider the following big ideas when designing and delivering
instruction:
• Students learn best when they actively construct meaning through experience-based learning activities.
• A student's culture, experiences, and previous knowledge (i.e., cognitive schema) shape all new learning.
• Learning depends on three dominant brain functions: (1) an innate search for meaning and purpose when learning; (2) an ongoing connection between emotion and cognition, including a tendency to slip into lower brain functions and structures when threatened; and (3) an innate predisposition to find patterns in the learning environment, beginning with wholes rather than parts.
• Learning is heavily situated; students' application and transfer of learning to new situations and contexts does not occur automatically. Teachers must help students to scaffold knowledge and skills; they plan for transfer by helping the learner move from modeling to guided practice to independent application.
• Knowing or being able to do something does not guarantee that the learner understands it.
• Students learn best when studying a curriculum that replaces simple coverage with an in-depth inquiry and with independent application experiences.
• Students benefit from a curriculum that cues them into big ideas, enduring understandings, and essential questions.
2. Teaching for deep understanding emphasizes students' capacity
for meaningful independent use of essential declarative knowledge (facts, concepts,
generalizations, rules, principles, and laws) and procedural knowledge (skills,
procedures, and processes). Students demonstrate genuine understanding when
they express their learning through one or more of the following facets of understanding:
• Explanation: The ability to demonstrate, derive, describe, design, justify, or prove something using evidence.
• Interpretation: The creation of something new from learned knowledge, including the ability to critique, create analogies and metaphors, draw inferences, construct meaning, translate, predict, and hypothesize.
• Application: The ability to use learned knowledge in new, unique, or unpredictable situations and contexts, including the ability to build, create, invent, perform, produce, solve, and test.
• Perspective: The ability to analyze and draw conclusions about contrasting viewpoints concerning the same event, topic, or situation.
• Empathy: The capacity to walk in another's shoes, including participating in role-play, describing another's emotions, and analyzing and justifying someone else's reactions.
• Self-Knowledge: The ability to self-examine, self-reflect, self-evaluate, and express reflective insight, particularly the capacity for monitoring and modifying one's own comprehension of information and events.
3. At the heart of teaching for understanding is the creation of a
consensus-driven curriculum that clearly distinguishes between and
among what is just worth being familiar with versus what all students should
know, be able to do, and understand.
4. The best instructional designs are backward; that is, they begin with desired results, rather than with instructional activities. UbD's backward design process involves three interrelated stages:
• Stage One: Identifying desired results (such as enduring understandings, essential questions, and enabling knowledge objectives).
• Stage Two: Determining acceptable evidence to assess and to evaluate student achievement of desired results.
• Stage Three: Designing learning activities to promote all students' mastery of desired results and their subsequent success on identified assessment tasks.
5. Students develop deep conceptual understanding when they can cue into the
enduring understandings and essential questions at the heart
of their curriculum. Enduring understandings are statements that clearly articulate
big ideas that have lasting value beyond the classroom and that students can
revisit throughout their lives. Essential questions are big, open-ended interpretive
questions that have no one obvious right answer. They raise other important
questions, recur naturally, and go to the heart of a discipline or content area's
philosophical and conceptual foundations.
6. Objectives that enable knowledge clearly specify, in measurable terms, what all students should know and be able to do to achieve desired understanding and to respond to essential questions (Stage One). Ideally, understanding-driven objectives should begin with behavioral verbs reflective of one or more of the six facets of understanding: explanation, interpretation, application, perspective, empathy, and self-knowledge (Wiggins & McTighe, 1998, p. 44).
7. When designing Stage Two assessments of student performance, educators must
keep in mind the metaphor of a photo album, rather than the more traditional
metaphor of a snapshot. Effective monitoring of a student's progress should
incorporate many assessment tools and processes, including
these:
• Tests and quizzes with constructed-response (performance-based) items, rather than exclusive use of selected-response items (true-false, fill-in-the-blank, multiple choice).
• Reflective assessments, such as journals, logs, listen-think-pair-share activities, interviews, self-evaluation activities, and peer response groups.
• Academic prompts that clearly specify performance task elements, such as format, audience, topic, and purpose.
• Culminating assessment projects that allow for student choice and independent application.
8. A primary goal of teaching for understanding should be the assurance that students can use their acquired understandings and knowledge independently in real-world situations and scenarios. Culminating performance-based projects (what Wiggins and McTighe refer to as GRASPS), therefore, should include the following core elements:
• G = Goals from the real world.
• R = Roles that are authentic and based in reality.
• A = Audiences to whom students will present final products and performances.
• S = Situations involving a real-world conflict to be resolved, decision to be made, investigation to be completed, or invention to be created.
• P = Products and performances culminating from the study.
• S = Standards for evaluating project-based products and performances.
9. Teaching for understanding should involve activities that support identified desired results and integrate planned assessments (Stage Three). Wiggins and McTighe identify seven core design principles for teaching in an understanding-based classroom in a template they call WHERETO. Each of the letters in this acronym corresponds to key instructional design questions educators should always consider when planning learning activities:
• W = How will you help your students to know where they are headed, why they are going there, and what ways they will be evaluated along the way?
• H = How will you hook and engage students' interest and enthusiasm through thought-provoking experiences at the beginning of each instructional episode?
• E = What experiences will you provide to help students make their understandings real and to equip all learners for success throughout your unit or course?
• R = How will you cause students to reflect, revisit, revise, and rethink?
• E = How will students express their understandings and engage in meaningful self-evaluation?
• T = How will you tailor (differentiate) your instruction to address the unique strengths and needs of every learner?
• O = How will you organize learning experiences so that students move from teacher-guided and concrete activities to independent applications that emphasize growing conceptual understandings?
10. Understanding by Design is not a program to be implemented; rather, it represents a synthesis of research-based best practices that are associated with improving student achievement. Successful UbD learning organizations are collaborative communities that emphasize practitioner inquiry, including the following:
• Peer Coaching: Professional colleagues support one another by scripting lessons, providing focused feedback, and engaging in cognitive coaching (i.e., shared inquiry designed to align staff members' perceptions and judgments).
• Study Groups: Colleagues study a text or explore an issue together and pool their experiences, reflections, and resources for understanding.
• Inquiry Teams: Colleagues focus their study on a shared student achievement issue or an organizational problem that they wish to investigate together as an extension of their initial study group discussions.
Note: This material is a synthesis of the writings of Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe.