As a good deal of us in class read Wiggins and McTighe's Understanding by Design over the summer, I was already briefed on some of this material. What I really like about the chapter is the condensation of a very dense theory being presented. The book UbD is very dense and contains a great deal of strategies, so it was nice to see a smaller version for retention purposes. In the chapter, McTighe addresses Backward Design that places an extreme focus on understanding and not memorizing facts. As a future History teacher, it will be essential for my students to not only know history, but understand the mechanisms involved in events, relatable causal factors, and contributions by key figures, philosophies, and documents. According to McTighe's theory, any teacher-student relationship can allow for memorization, but the understanding aspect of this discipline and every discipline falls to the wayside. According to McTighe, teaching is "the means to the end". Planning is the key to better understanding. In this chapter, McTighe has mapped out planing in three stages: Identify desired results, Determine acceptable evidence, and Plan learning experiences and instruction. Identifying the results can incorporate the K-W-L map in that what is the outcome of the lesson on behalf of the student's understanding. Determining acceptable evidence appears as a means of assessment. There has to be a rubric or set forth criteria, in which the student must achieve based on a level of understanding. Finally, planning experiences for understanding places the content in real world applications for the student. This ultimately measures the level and creativeness of the student's understanding. According to McTighe, these steps cannot be attempted without extensive planning by the teacher and a strong pre-material review and presentation. By page 277, McTighe examines the strategies for the teacher in regards to understanding and planning. The second implication resonated with me the strongest because of the notion that students in history classes will have to apply the knowledge they have gained in real world applications. For example, to hold a Second Continental Congress debate over the Bill of Rights, Failures of the Articles of Confederation, and testing of the resiliency of the US Constitution through re-enacted / re-applied courts cases such as: Marbury V. Madison, McColluch V. Maryland, and Gibbons V. Ogden. These exercises can contribute massively to understanding by doing history versus memorizing facts about the aspects. - James Cheatham
Piggy-backing on what James has already said, I too, was conditioned on this information from another masters course over the summer. I found this chapter much easier to interpret than the original book, and have a much better understanding of the material now. Page 280 makes a very valuable point when McTighe says "--that teachers set up realistic, authentic contexts for assessment, for it is when students are able to transfer their learning thoughtfully and flexibly that they demonstrate true understanding." I think this phrase holds the true essence on what we, as teachers, are to accomplish. Our goal as an educator is to prepare young minds for future endeavors, and students need to be able to demonstrate application of core materials in able to use these sets of knowledge for real-life situations. This is further exemplified on page 282 when McTighe mentions, "...student motivation by presenting meaningful real-world performance goals achieved through purposeful learning." Purposeful learning is what teaching is all about. We need to make everything relevant and purposeful so that students find the true meaning in what they are being asked to learn. I appreciate the anticipatory set examples on page 285, and the broad array of ideas that the author has set forth for me to use in my classroom. As a teacher, I always try to make my anticipatory set interesting, but sometimes fail to receive the "wow factor". I will definitely be using these ideas when I return to the classroom. I believe the true meaning of this chapter is finding relevance in everything that is being taught. So many students fail to become interested in school because they fail to find relevance in what they are being asked to do. Why would a student write a lab report on DNA for no reason? The relevance of this information is what makes the learning purposeful for the student. The backwards design model mentioned in this chapter is a brilliant mechanism when trying to find the "essential question" or relevance in what you are teaching to students. By starting at the assessment, teachers are able to start at their end goal, and work backwards as to how they will achieve that goal through various processes. This ensures that each process is meaningful and has relevance. --Caitlin Unterman
Not to repeat what James and Caitlin have already said but I to had learned about backwards design in another masters course over the summer. Over the summer when we first learned about backwards design I found it sort of confusing and asking myself why should I write my lessons this way? Now that I am in my practicum writing lesson plans I understand that the KUD is an important aspect of my lesson. It allows me to think about the purpose to the lesson. The section on the "Hook and Hold" the Learner's Interest I found very interesting. I find it often hard sometimes when teaching at my practicum to keep my students attention when we are doing an activity they are the least bit interested in. I want to/need to find a way to "hook and hold" my students attention in history. Especially, because many students do not like the subject and find it kinda boring. I would like a technique tailored to my content area that could help with the "hook and hold" of my students. Overall, the chapter reminded me a lot of what we had learned over the summer in the Understanding By Design book by Wiggins and McTighe. Most of what McTighe talks about can be implemented easily into the classroom. -Ashley Knowles
I did not take the summer courses, but in my first practicum, which focused on reading, Professor Parker spent a class period discussing lesson plans, which featured backward design but much simpler objectives than are often appropriate for secondary students. As Caitlin and James have detailed, purposeful learning comes from thoughtful assessments and relevant objectives, or perhaps it's thoughtful objectives and relevant assessments. In my special education placements in particular, I am working with students who have been in self-contained classrooms for most of their academic experiences--much of their work has been meaningless, and while they struggle with the material, it is sadly and obviously busy work. I am curious what will happen when I give them an essential question--not for the unit, just for the day; their time in SPED has somewhat crystallized their educational expectations, but they are older students and capable of carrying on discussions well above their ability levels in reading and writing.
I found it significant that so much of this chapter relates back to the student's personal associations and relationship with the material--activators that relate to student experiences or student opinions (so lacking in what I've seen of secondary education so far!); authentic tasks that validate students as participants, not pupils; and essential questions about what literature can teach them as readers. So much of what we've covered is about technique--and backward planning is a tremenously useful technique for writing respectful and purposeful lessons, because as a teacher you have to hold the desired results in your mind, especially when combined with a KUD set of objectives--but I think the most important and long-lasting idea I took from this is that we must really respect and value our students, by taking the time to know our material, to give them as close to real-world experiences as we can, and to make our whole class period relevant to both the material and their lives, given that we are going to ask them to think at a high level and to not sit with their heads down waiting for it to be over, no matter what their ability level is.--Noren Bonner
Having had a class over the summer that extensively drew from McTighe and Wiggins’ book Understanding by Design, I was familiar with the curricular design stages outlined by McTighe in this chapter. McTighe promotes using a “backward design” process in lesson planning: first identifying what students should know, understand, and do allows for the development of targeted strategies and activities to reach the desired outcome, determining acceptable evidence of learning and understanding allows for appropriate assessment, and finally, plan appropriate instruction based on decided outcomes and assessment. Of course I agree with McTighe that learners need to be able to make sense out of content and transfer big ideas to other areas of study or life. When planning lessons, I always write a KUD to first determine the big understanding and what I want students to be able to know and do so that I can teach with that in mind. I think that planning lessons this way definitely reduces content overload because you are able to focus the content you do choose to teach towards a broader goal while also adhering to standards.
One of McTighe’s instructional suggestions struck a chord with me: posting essential questions where they are visible to students. You can pose your question to students, or use an essential question to guide a lesson or assignment, but for students to reflect on it consistently when approaching problems, it should always be visible (whether written on the board before each class or posted on the classroom wall). Making your lessons relevant and meaningful to students is an important aspect of teaching, so I think that posing essential questions geared towards transferable ideas allows learners to see the importance of what they are learning. I haven’t had a difficult time teaching Chinese as all of my students have chosen to study it, but I have had difficulties during my Art practicum because I have found most of the students in the class find no relevance between art and their lives (though they are middle-schoolers). Many of them put little effort into their work and constantly complain that “this is stupid.” While my clinical teacher does a wonderful job explaining skill and technique and that the purpose of exercises is to improve their skills, the students are just not interested and most of their work demonstrates this. I do wonder how much their effort and performance would improve if art making became relevant to them. ~Joanna Bourque
I see that mostly everyone else is speaking about learning about backwards design in their summer classes. I did not take classes over the summer, so this is my first time learning about backwards design and I think it offers a good way to think about lesson planning. One of the things I continually think and worry about is how to plan lessons, both long and short term. How do I take the predescribed standards and turn them into specific units? How do I pace each day to make sure we finish on time? How do I fit in standardized test prep with what I want to teach?
The theory of using WHERE to successfully plan and teach studentcar knowledge instead of facts fits along well with what we've been reading about before. I even had an event today where the 9th grade students in my homeroom were complaining about algebra and geometry wondering why they had to learn it (it was hard for me personally to come up with a good reason since I am not so adept at math). Students aren't seeing the big picture with some of the things they study, so they simply write it off as unimportant. That's one of the things I worry about - no matter what you teach, you're going to have that one student who just doesn't want to be there and who doesn't understand why what you're teaching is important.
The most important thing I think I learned from the chapter was that its okay, even good, to have projects associated with your learning, but they have to mean something. Doing projects for projects sake does nothing to help students learn. I have been thinking a lot about how to make things fun in my class, things to do that have to do with what they're learning, but if it doesn't add to their learning, it's probably not a worthwhile project. --Erin Caracappa
Jay McTighe's chapter 11, "Understanding by Design and Instruction", seems to cover the practices that have been ingrained in all of us since we embarked upon this graduate program: know what you want your students to learn, be clear and forthcoming with your plans and expectations, determine how you will be able to judge whether or not your students have learned, and make the classroom experience engaging and relevant. McTighe provides seven steps to improve instruction and thus learning for students, and imbedded in these steps is the acronym WHERE: What is important, why should I learn it, and what are the expectations?; Hook and hold student's interests; Equip students to transfer their knowledge independently; Rethink, revise, and retry are important opportunities; and Engage students in self-evaluation and reflection. I found "Table 1: Observable Indicators of Suggested Instructional Practices" to be a practical and efficient summing up of the chapter.
While I was reading a few occurrences washed over me regarding feedback. I've been struggling with how to administer immediate feedback in the art classroom. Not only is feedback in art a fragile balance between constructive criticism and the building up of confidence, there are controversies centered around how to administer that feedback. For example, does the art teacher draw on the students works or not? For me, when a teacher drew on my work, it was a tremendous disrespect. In college, professors always showed me the desired effect on their own piece of paper so that they could see my progress clearly and not interrupted by their contributions. I appreciated this method greatly. In my high school placement, the instructor will go from raised hand to raised hand asking "What do you need help with?", the students will wave a finger around the white spaces and he will essentially day-by-day draw there works and see his own progress over theirs. This is only true for those students who are in art because there were no other viable options or "free passes" when they were signing up for exploretories. However, I don't think that this kind of feedback contributes to growth in skill or knowledge. I think it is essential that students (particularly in the arts) need to contribute to their own feedback, and as a teacher, my feedback should be done on separate materials.
Also, in a math class that I am shadowing the special education instructor, the main teacher had me help him grade tests. I began to make corrections instead of merely marking incorrect answers. I was told this was not allowed because students had done so poorly that they were going to be given the opportunity to make corrections themselves for extra credit. The problem with this method is that the students were not allowed to use their books or notes to make corrections, nor were they told they would be given such an opportunity. How then can they earn extra credit? How could they know how to fix what they don't understand? The material was not re-taught and no one made an A. In this particular instance, I think corrections aught to have been made on the test, there should have been time in class for students to ask questions about what they need help grasping, and then and extra credit homework assignment from the text or carefully chosen problems could have been provided for those who wished to improve their grades. But, alas, I am not in charge.
Another aspect of the text that I kept mulling over in my mind has to do with the ever present standardized testing debacle. We all know that these tests no longer measure what they were intended to, students don't learn effectively and teachers don't teach effectively when they are "motivated" by these summative assessments, and that the tests should not determine a student's academic status nor a teacher's salary. So, why should the government have a hand in summative assessments? The government should provide national standards to ensure the quality of public education, but why can't teachers provide summaries of portfolios that exhibit their students progress related to these standards? Why should the government be in control of the testing if it is not doing the teaching? I think this might motivate teachers and students to really learn.
While McTighe's chapter seemed to be a review, I did find it to be a stimulating spring board for my own reflections. --Holly Tucker
Piggy-backing on what James has already said, I too, was conditioned on this information from another masters course over the summer. I found this chapter much easier to interpret than the original book, and have a much better understanding of the material now. Page 280 makes a very valuable point when McTighe says "--that teachers set up realistic, authentic contexts for assessment, for it is when students are able to transfer their learning thoughtfully and flexibly that they demonstrate true understanding." I think this phrase holds the true essence on what we, as teachers, are to accomplish. Our goal as an educator is to prepare young minds for future endeavors, and students need to be able to demonstrate application of core materials in able to use these sets of knowledge for real-life situations. This is further exemplified on page 282 when McTighe mentions, "...student motivation by presenting meaningful real-world performance goals achieved through purposeful learning." Purposeful learning is what teaching is all about. We need to make everything relevant and purposeful so that students find the true meaning in what they are being asked to learn. I appreciate the anticipatory set examples on page 285, and the broad array of ideas that the author has set forth for me to use in my classroom. As a teacher, I always try to make my anticipatory set interesting, but sometimes fail to receive the "wow factor". I will definitely be using these ideas when I return to the classroom. I believe the true meaning of this chapter is finding relevance in everything that is being taught. So many students fail to become interested in school because they fail to find relevance in what they are being asked to do. Why would a student write a lab report on DNA for no reason? The relevance of this information is what makes the learning purposeful for the student. The backwards design model mentioned in this chapter is a brilliant mechanism when trying to find the "essential question" or relevance in what you are teaching to students. By starting at the assessment, teachers are able to start at their end goal, and work backwards as to how they will achieve that goal through various processes. This ensures that each process is meaningful and has relevance. --Caitlin Unterman
Not to repeat what James and Caitlin have already said but I to had learned about backwards design in another masters course over the summer. Over the summer when we first learned about backwards design I found it sort of confusing and asking myself why should I write my lessons this way? Now that I am in my practicum writing lesson plans I understand that the KUD is an important aspect of my lesson. It allows me to think about the purpose to the lesson. The section on the "Hook and Hold" the Learner's Interest I found very interesting. I find it often hard sometimes when teaching at my practicum to keep my students attention when we are doing an activity they are the least bit interested in. I want to/need to find a way to "hook and hold" my students attention in history. Especially, because many students do not like the subject and find it kinda boring. I would like a technique tailored to my content area that could help with the "hook and hold" of my students. Overall, the chapter reminded me a lot of what we had learned over the summer in the Understanding By Design book by Wiggins and McTighe. Most of what McTighe talks about can be implemented easily into the classroom. -Ashley Knowles
I did not take the summer courses, but in my first practicum, which focused on reading, Professor Parker spent a class period discussing lesson plans, which featured backward design but much simpler objectives than are often appropriate for secondary students. As Caitlin and James have detailed, purposeful learning comes from thoughtful assessments and relevant objectives, or perhaps it's thoughtful objectives and relevant assessments. In my special education placements in particular, I am working with students who have been in self-contained classrooms for most of their academic experiences--much of their work has been meaningless, and while they struggle with the material, it is sadly and obviously busy work. I am curious what will happen when I give them an essential question--not for the unit, just for the day; their time in SPED has somewhat crystallized their educational expectations, but they are older students and capable of carrying on discussions well above their ability levels in reading and writing.
I found it significant that so much of this chapter relates back to the student's personal associations and relationship with the material--activators that relate to student experiences or student opinions (so lacking in what I've seen of secondary education so far!); authentic tasks that validate students as participants, not pupils; and essential questions about what literature can teach them as readers. So much of what we've covered is about technique--and backward planning is a tremenously useful technique for writing respectful and purposeful lessons, because as a teacher you have to hold the desired results in your mind, especially when combined with a KUD set of objectives--but I think the most important and long-lasting idea I took from this is that we must really respect and value our students, by taking the time to know our material, to give them as close to real-world experiences as we can, and to make our whole class period relevant to both the material and their lives, given that we are going to ask them to think at a high level and to not sit with their heads down waiting for it to be over, no matter what their ability level is.--Noren Bonner
Having had a class over the summer that extensively drew from McTighe and Wiggins’ book Understanding by Design, I was familiar with the curricular design stages outlined by McTighe in this chapter. McTighe promotes using a “backward design” process in lesson planning: first identifying what students should know, understand, and do allows for the development of targeted strategies and activities to reach the desired outcome, determining acceptable evidence of learning and understanding allows for appropriate assessment, and finally, plan appropriate instruction based on decided outcomes and assessment. Of course I agree with McTighe that learners need to be able to make sense out of content and transfer big ideas to other areas of study or life. When planning lessons, I always write a KUD to first determine the big understanding and what I want students to be able to know and do so that I can teach with that in mind. I think that planning lessons this way definitely reduces content overload because you are able to focus the content you do choose to teach towards a broader goal while also adhering to standards.
One of McTighe’s instructional suggestions struck a chord with me: posting essential questions where they are visible to students. You can pose your question to students, or use an essential question to guide a lesson or assignment, but for students to reflect on it consistently when approaching problems, it should always be visible (whether written on the board before each class or posted on the classroom wall). Making your lessons relevant and meaningful to students is an important aspect of teaching, so I think that posing essential questions geared towards transferable ideas allows learners to see the importance of what they are learning. I haven’t had a difficult time teaching Chinese as all of my students have chosen to study it, but I have had difficulties during my Art practicum because I have found most of the students in the class find no relevance between art and their lives (though they are middle-schoolers). Many of them put little effort into their work and constantly complain that “this is stupid.” While my clinical teacher does a wonderful job explaining skill and technique and that the purpose of exercises is to improve their skills, the students are just not interested and most of their work demonstrates this. I do wonder how much their effort and performance would improve if art making became relevant to them. ~Joanna Bourque
I see that mostly everyone else is speaking about learning about backwards design in their summer classes. I did not take classes over the summer, so this is my first time learning about backwards design and I think it offers a good way to think about lesson planning. One of the things I continually think and worry about is how to plan lessons, both long and short term. How do I take the predescribed standards and turn them into specific units? How do I pace each day to make sure we finish on time? How do I fit in standardized test prep with what I want to teach?
The theory of using WHERE to successfully plan and teach studentcar knowledge instead of facts fits along well with what we've been reading about before. I even had an event today where the 9th grade students in my homeroom were complaining about algebra and geometry wondering why they had to learn it (it was hard for me personally to come up with a good reason since I am not so adept at math). Students aren't seeing the big picture with some of the things they study, so they simply write it off as unimportant. That's one of the things I worry about - no matter what you teach, you're going to have that one student who just doesn't want to be there and who doesn't understand why what you're teaching is important.
The most important thing I think I learned from the chapter was that its okay, even good, to have projects associated with your learning, but they have to mean something. Doing projects for projects sake does nothing to help students learn. I have been thinking a lot about how to make things fun in my class, things to do that have to do with what they're learning, but if it doesn't add to their learning, it's probably not a worthwhile project. --Erin Caracappa
Jay McTighe's chapter 11, "Understanding by Design and Instruction", seems to cover the practices that have been ingrained in all of us since we embarked upon this graduate program: know what you want your students to learn, be clear and forthcoming with your plans and expectations, determine how you will be able to judge whether or not your students have learned, and make the classroom experience engaging and relevant. McTighe provides seven steps to improve instruction and thus learning for students, and imbedded in these steps is the acronym WHERE: What is important, why should I learn it, and what are the expectations?; Hook and hold student's interests; Equip students to transfer their knowledge independently; Rethink, revise, and retry are important opportunities; and Engage students in self-evaluation and reflection. I found "Table 1: Observable Indicators of Suggested Instructional Practices" to be a practical and efficient summing up of the chapter.
While I was reading a few occurrences washed over me regarding feedback. I've been struggling with how to administer immediate feedback in the art classroom. Not only is feedback in art a fragile balance between constructive criticism and the building up of confidence, there are controversies centered around how to administer that feedback. For example, does the art teacher draw on the students works or not? For me, when a teacher drew on my work, it was a tremendous disrespect. In college, professors always showed me the desired effect on their own piece of paper so that they could see my progress clearly and not interrupted by their contributions. I appreciated this method greatly. In my high school placement, the instructor will go from raised hand to raised hand asking "What do you need help with?", the students will wave a finger around the white spaces and he will essentially day-by-day draw there works and see his own progress over theirs. This is only true for those students who are in art because there were no other viable options or "free passes" when they were signing up for exploretories. However, I don't think that this kind of feedback contributes to growth in skill or knowledge. I think it is essential that students (particularly in the arts) need to contribute to their own feedback, and as a teacher, my feedback should be done on separate materials.
Also, in a math class that I am shadowing the special education instructor, the main teacher had me help him grade tests. I began to make corrections instead of merely marking incorrect answers. I was told this was not allowed because students had done so poorly that they were going to be given the opportunity to make corrections themselves for extra credit. The problem with this method is that the students were not allowed to use their books or notes to make corrections, nor were they told they would be given such an opportunity. How then can they earn extra credit? How could they know how to fix what they don't understand? The material was not re-taught and no one made an A. In this particular instance, I think corrections aught to have been made on the test, there should have been time in class for students to ask questions about what they need help grasping, and then and extra credit homework assignment from the text or carefully chosen problems could have been provided for those who wished to improve their grades. But, alas, I am not in charge.
Another aspect of the text that I kept mulling over in my mind has to do with the ever present standardized testing debacle. We all know that these tests no longer measure what they were intended to, students don't learn effectively and teachers don't teach effectively when they are "motivated" by these summative assessments, and that the tests should not determine a student's academic status nor a teacher's salary. So, why should the government have a hand in summative assessments? The government should provide national standards to ensure the quality of public education, but why can't teachers provide summaries of portfolios that exhibit their students progress related to these standards? Why should the government be in control of the testing if it is not doing the teaching? I think this might motivate teachers and students to really learn.
While McTighe's chapter seemed to be a review, I did find it to be a stimulating spring board for my own reflections.
--Holly Tucker