Understanding By Design (UbD)

1. Understanding By Design (UbD) An overview Excerpted in large part from Making the Most of Understanding by Design By John L. Brown

2. Research to back up UbD • Students learn best when they actively construct meaning through experience-based activities • A student’s culture, experiences, and previous knowledge shape all new learning

3. Learning depends on three main 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

4. Student’s application and transfer to new situations does not occur automatically. • Teachers must help students to scaffold knowledge by helping the learner from modeling to guided practice to independent application.

5. 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 in-depth inquiry and independent application experiences.

6. Students benefit from a curriculum that cues them into big ideas, enduring understandings, and essential questions.

7. 6 Facets of Understanding • Explanation • Interpretation • Application • Perspective • Empathy • Self-Knowledge

8. Priority Driven Curriculum • Clearly distinguishes between what is worth being familiar with and what all students need to know, be able to do, and understand

9. Backward Instructional Design • Stage One: Identifying desired results (such as enduring understandings, essential questions and knowledge objectives). • Stage Two: Determining acceptable evidence to assess and to evaluate student achievement of desired results. • Stage Three: Designing learning activities to promote student mastery and success on assessment tasks.

10. STAGE ONE Identifying desired results

11. Enduring Understandings • Statements that articulate big ideas that have lasting value beyond the classroom and that students can revisit throughout their lives.

12. Essential Questions • Big open-ended interpretive questions that have no one obvious right answer. • They raise other important questions and go to the heart of a discipline.

13. Knowledge Objectives • They clearly specify what students should know and be able to do,

14. STAGE TWO Determining acceptable evidence

15. Designing Assessments A Photo Album/not a snapshot • Tests and quizzes with performance based items • Reflective assessments (journals, logs, interviews, self-evaluations, peer response groups) • Culminating assessment projects

16. Teaching for Understanding • Students need to use their acquired understandings and knowledge in real-world settings • Thus, performance based projects should include the core GRASPS elements...

17. GRASPS • 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 • P=Products and Performances culminating from the study • S=Standards for evaluating project-based products and performances

18. STAGE THREE Designing learning activities

19. WHERETO • Each of the letters in the acronym corresponds to instructional design questions that teachers should consider when designing instructional activities...

20. WHERETO • 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 student interest? • E = What EXPERIENCES will you provide to help students make their understandings real and to EQUIP all learners for success? • R = How will you cause students to REFLECT, REVISE, and RETHINK?

21. E = How will students EXPRESS their understandings and engage in meaningful self-EVALUATION? • T = How will you TAILOR (differentiate) your instruction to meet the needs of each learner? • O = How will you ORGANIZElearning experiences that emphasize conceptual understandings?