B1+UbD+Chapter+3

toc
Abstract:

The title of the third chapter of Integrating Differentiated Instruction and Understanding by Design provides the focus of the chapter while modeling an essential question. “What Really Matters in Learning? (Content)” focuses on how to use the [|backwards design model] to plan units that reveal important understandings about the subject rather than covering facts from a textbook. Teachers using the backwards design model must first draw “big ideas” from standards and then develop essential questions that will lead students to uncover the understandings. The three main stages of the model are: identify desired results, determine acceptable evidence, and finally, plan learning experiences and instruction (Tomlinson and McTighe, 27-28). Backwards design provides a framework for covering standards while implementing differentiated and engaging learning experiences for students. While all students work towards uncovering the same understandings, backwards design allows for differentiation in the later stages of the design plan to allow for all students to be able to access the understandings and essential questions of the unit or lesson. Tomlinson and McTighe warn against the “twin sins” of teaching that trap many teachers. The first of which is teaching a broad range of facts from the book without going deeper to find understanding. The second “sin” is implementing lessons and activities without an overarching plan or organization which leads students to deeper understandings. When using backwards design the teacher must constantly be assessing the students to determine their individual understanding of the content. If students are missing knowledge or progressing ahead the instructor can differentiate to facilitate the growth of each student.

Synthesis:

For today’s students and future teachers one of the biggest set-backs to effective learning is the overwhelming amount of content that needs to be mastered each year. Backwards design can be hard to picture in the classroom because many students have not seen it modeled effectively. Many students cited AP courses, science classes, and history classes amongst common offenders of “content overload.” When students and teachers feel overwhelmed by the breadth of material and facts presented in textbooks it is difficult for students to process and think about all the material and teachers are not able to spend time on skills students need work on. Learning straight from textbooks can be dull and monotonous and does not challenge students or offer much in the way of differentiation. Pre-service teachers learning how to implement backwards design are excited by the opportunities this model offers for delving deeper into focused topics and establishing end goals for the students with a pathway towards achievement. Future teachers admit that it can be challenging to extract big ideas and [|essential questions] from the standards in order to decide what to teach, but generally believe it seems less stressful than teaching a wide range of material from a textbook. Developing understanding in students rather than cramming facts offers educators a more creative and potentially rewarding experience. The framework offered by Understanding by Design and backwards design helps teachers to organize and focus a standards based curriculum rather than be overwhelmed by it. Students learning in a classroom guided by Understanding by Design will have the opportunity to learn the skills they need to progress and be challenged to think critically rather than memorize facts.

Leigh Welch
Chapter three focused mainly on backwards design. This is a form, favored by the book, which you use to create lessons and mostly, units. The book also talks about content in this chapter, which goes very well with the backwards design. Overloading and teaching directly from the book are problems that this chapter addresses that I completely agree with. I find it difficult to learn when I am overloaded with facts or I am learning something directly out of the textbook, because it is usually dry. I need a little more creativity from my teacher in terms of lessons and activities. “Big ideas” and “essential questions” were terms introduced in this chapter that made a lot of sense to me and that I could think of certain teachers that I have had that used these tools to enhance their class. In my history classes, freshmen and sophomore years of high school I had one of my favorite teachers, Mr. Hanish, and he was all about capturing the big ideas and answering questions that you really had to think about. I think this is what made his classes so interesting. I then had Mr. Hanish again for psychology me senior year of high school and found that you can use these essential questions and open them up into group discussions and debates rather than just leaving them on tests and quizzes to answer for yourself. I do love the idea of these deep thinking questions but I am still confused on how to introduce them into a math room setting. This may be because I have never been part of a math class that has introduced this lesson type to me personally, but I have to try and keep that in mind as I move further down the road.

Paul Santamore
The main points of this chapter were exactly what we discussed in class number three. The author focused in on how to design a unit that benefits all students through backward design and differentiation. At the beginning of the chapter the author talks about the myriad of standards currently floating around in schools all across the United States. He basically states that if we do not break this plethora of information down into a small number of very important and enduring understandings, we will be leaving our students lost in a sea of overwhelming content. The teacher should always work to peel back the layers of the content that he or she wishes to pitch to the students into three or four essential points of knowledge. By doing this, the teacher is laying out a simple list of big ideas that the student should be able to comprehend and remember after the unit is complete; this is the key to the backward design process. We as teachers are essentially finding what needs to be understood in the long run before we do anything else. I will certainly be using these ideas in my classroom, as I have already begun to plan my unit in class number three. This chapter gave me some more ideas and examples as to how I may find the big themes and enduring understandings within the content that I want to teach. Hopefully, as the book describes, my students and their parents will be able to see that, “the underlying goal of all school efforts is to improve student learning of important content” (27). By giving my students the ability to comprehend and apply the important pieces of history, I hope to create strong thinkers and active classroom leaders.

Carinne Haigis
Before reading this chapter, I was beginning to feel a bit overwhelmed with the concept of standards. It seemed to me that having to teach so many specific goals may potentially leave little room for creativity. However, after reading this chapter and seeing the varied ways and options that one can use to teach standards, I feel a bit more comfortable. Early on in the chapter, the authors address the concept of textbooks in the classroom. On this subject, they write: “Content standards are not the only problem; textbooks frequently exacerbate the situation…The result is a surfeit of information, a ‘mile wide, inch deep’ treatment of subject area knowledge” (Tomlinson, McTighe 25). This is a statement I found myself agreeing with completely. When I was in high school, I had several teachers whose lessons and units followed the class textbook almost exactly. This made it easier when it came to studying for tests as all of the information could be found by briefly examining the chapters we had been covering. However, this is an illustration of the “mile wide, inch deep” method that Tomlinson, and McTighe refer to in the passage above. Because of this method of teaching, we were not able to go into extreme depth of the material. We covered a lot of facts, but rarely gained further insight into what we were reading about. Textbooks ought to be used to supplement classroom information and to provide a resource for students to use, but the class should certainly not revolve entirely around the book. It is up to the teacher to spark in students a love for learning and the best way to do this is to create lesson plans that are unique and instructive rather than merely taken straight out of the pages of a book.

Mel Christensen
The backwards design model provides a logical framework for covering standards while still being creative when designing curriculum. Whether or not standards are effective guides for education in the United States, teachers are required to follow them and models like backwards design and Understanding by Design are exciting ways to approach teaching in a standards based system. Using standards as an outline allows for teachers to delve into what is important and relevant to students within a certain standard and be creative in designing and differentiating activities and assignments that will be meaningful to the students while still fulfilling the requirements of the standard. The two “sins” of teaching (Tomlinson and McTighe, 28) mentioned in the chapter were things I feel are prevalent in schools today. Although I have sat through many classes that either cruised through a textbook or jumped from activity to activity without creating a coherent framework or context for understanding and still learned a good deal, I am excited by the way backwards design and Understanding by Design pull away from those methods of teaching. I do not want to feel like I’m tied to a textbook when I am teaching, and I understand that when being creative with activities, assignments, and learning experiences there needs to be a focus and organization. Textbooks are an important resource, but they are not the only resource. I like the structure and focus the backwards design model provides while still giving the instructor freedom to implement meaningful learning experiences.

Allison Reynolds
When reading about what really matters when working with content, at first I thought that it all sounded simple to apply. The chapter spoke about how you first establish goals, then determine evidence to support it, then finally plan the lesson with all this in mind. I thought it was a very interesting and simple idea until I put it into practice during the class. This way of thinking is incredibly challenging the first time around. I always assumed you would make plans with the goal in mind, but also applying the “big ideas” and the evidence is the difficult part of me. I am contemplating the part of thinking like an assessor because I have never had to do that. I am not exactly sure what it means right now, but I did take away that it means looking at the results before planning. I am not sure how to implement that into my classroom right now, but I look forward to being introduced to it or even seeing it in action. I also learned about how a responsive teacher needs to address the content in order to fill gaps. This is the area of knowledge and skill objectives, which I am looking forward to learning more about in class. I didn’t even think about how to fill the gaps that students may have while trying to teach the lesson. One idea I had while reading is to ask students to brainstorm what we know about this subject and see what others in the class say. Hopefully some students will speak up and say, “wait, I never learned that” and we can address that gap.

Bianca Stoutamyer
Chapter three makes an impact on my classroom and me due to the fact that it is the way I will be creating my unit all semester. I really liked how it went in to more detail about why teachers have begun to use backward design, knowing why the change is occurring and seeing examples makes it easier for me to jump right on board. Backwards design also allows for the teacher to see through the eyes of an assessor. Unfortunately passing assessments is very important in the schools today and backwards design will allow me to look at the big picture of my classroom and what I want my students to accomplish during the year while also teaching them material to help them pass a standardized test. I also liked the quote “A river needs banks to flow,” this quote summarizes what I wish to do in my classroom. I want to give my students the knowledge and tools to allow them to be successful both inside and outside my classroom. The backward design seems to allow me to guide my students without putting a large daunting roadblock or dam in their way. Having an example both given to us in class and in the book allows me as a teacher planning a unit to be able to stay organized and working with the backwards design. If I didn’t have a framework I most likely would lose focus and plan lessons that do not meet the standards yet are fun for the students when with focus I can do both.

Kellie Sanborn
This chapter’s focus on backward design made a lot of sense to me. Planning backward from the “big ideas” and essential questions of the lesson allows the teacher to plan lessons while being sure that each lesson is doing something toward a purpose, not just hoping that it will hit the mark. Relating it to my content matter, it is very similar to the process of writing a basic essay. One never starts from the supporting paragraphs or even from the first sentence of the paper. You must first create a thesis, the point which you are eventually trying to prove, and work your way backward from there until the point becomes obvious. In backward design, we as educators must first figure out what it is that we want our students to eventually take away from the lesson and what questions they should be able to answer, and then work our way down to how to teach it to them and what means we will use. I especially appreciated the point about the “twin sins” (activity-oriented instruction and coverage). As I read about these “sins”, I realized that they sounded far too familiar, and then it occurred to me that I had seen both of them in action, specifically in classes in middle in high school that I really did not enjoy and did not feel like I had learned much from. I think that a lot of standards are very difficult to meet and so teachers just sort of “covered” them, especially in AP classes where there is so much crammed into a year. I think that using backward design can help to solve some of this problem, but a lot of it is due to the fact that there is just too much to fit into the amount of time allotted, which is quite unfortunate.

Ashton Carmichael
At first, I was confused and annoyed with backward planning. I did not see the tool useful or effective. I thought: how can thinking about teaching backward help me or the students? After reading Chapter Three of Understanding by Design I have a better grasp at how this method works and how I can apply it to my career. By first asking myself what I want the students to take from the unit, I relive a lot of immediate stress. Why make plans for a topic that I do not need to cover in this section? Simply, I would not. This method makes sense to me after coming to this reasoning: You want a lesson to match the unit instead of the unit matching the lesson. And, of course, assessing the students on what they have learned is an essential part of the job. The assessing helps in multiple ways, it lets you, the educator, know that the students are learning the information, but also that the way you are teaching it is effective. Naturally, it makes sense to make up the assessments before the lessons because if you have the assessment done, you know what you expect the students to learn before actually teaching them. By doing this, moving on to designing the lessons will run a lot smoother. I can see me designing my lessons the same way. In that, I know what I want my students to know before I start the lesson, I know how I will assess that knowledge with homework, and then teach based on what I want them to know for the homework. After reading this chapter, I understand and feel much more confident with the backward planning method

Jason B
Teachers have a very intense curriculum to cover in a very short amount of time. In other words, there simply is not enough time to cover every topic, and many topics require much time to learn. Many teachers realize this issue and find themselves picking what they believe to be the most important topics to teach. One way to work with this problem is to find a way to teach efficiently. Many teachers decide to teach using a method called Backward Design, which is what we are learning about in class. Backward Design starts by establishing goals for the students. These goals usually include national, and state standards along with professional ones as well. The next step in Backward Design is enduring understandings. This is the section where the teacher figures out what big ideas they want their students to know by the end of the lesson. These are broad ideas that cover the big picture and not specific items to be learned. The next step is to ask open questions. These questions are simply the big ideas that you want the students to know in the form of a question. The method of Backward Design will aid me in my classroom because it will show me a goal that I want to reach in the end. It is always easiest to complete a task when there is a goal involved. It also provides a list of understandings for the students. This can be useful when I need to check to see if I’ve met my goal. = =

Kaite Bukauskas
Often at times teachers are faced with an overbearing amount of content material which they are expected to teach to the class with an unfortunately small window of time in which they can teach it. This is referred to in the book as ‘content overload. This chapter stresses the idea of becoming very familiar with the content and then narrowing it down to what content will be emphasized and what content can be skipped over to avoid a teacher experiencing ‘content overload’. When planning a lesson, content standards can help sort out and detail what is expected of the learner at the end of the unit or semester, however they could also reinforce a feeling of ‘content overload’. It is important to utilize clarification of the learning standards in order to deliver age-appropriate lessons with performance indicators. By using a backwards planning method, teachers can prepare themselves for a lesson by realizing what detailed results they are after and planning the forms of assessment they shall use to test the learner in a way that demonstrates that he or she can retain and understand the information. It is important to keep the priorities mentioned in this chapter in mind as a practicum student because it gives us an insight to the way in which a teacher prepares his or her curriculum without becoming overwhelmed by the quantity of the content area.

Chris Whitney
Chapter Three of the UbD/DI book switches gears and talks about content area. After teachers have answered the question “how do my students learn best” the question becomes what do I teach them? It can be very difficult. Especially in subjects like science and history, to get through everything in the allotted time to do it. Even with many standards and benchmarks to follow, teachers can have a hard time forcing on what students should learn during the school year. This is where words like factlets, and essential questions come in handy when planning a lesson or a unit and deciding what to teach and what not to teach. By having essential questions to answer the teacher is making guidelines for student learning that are vague enough to be able to make multiple lessons out of it, but not too vague that students get a little information on a wide range of topics. Having a goal that is not too specific or vague is crucial in planning a lesson and use of the backwards plan helps too organize ideas and make sure lessons will convey what the teacher wants to teach. As stated before, no matter how good a lesson plan, if not all the students are learning, then it is not effective. Teachers need to adapt to students needs. Also, providing a safe environment for students to learn in.

Megan Hoffman
The main issue addressed by chapter three is that of content overload in current teaching standards. By bombarding kids with information, it is actually being counterproductive to learning because it is next to impossible for a child’s mind to process and think critically about the content. I enjoyed this chapter because in social studies it rings very true, it is so easy to get overwhelmed with the history of the world, especially if it is all being thrown at you at once. Complex and broad standards are partially to blame but textbook companies have some fault in them too, not only are they breaking the backs of today’s youth with their size- they are making their books to fit their own guidelines and that of every guideline in the country. Although the stress of overload is out there, there are methods to avoid it. The book explains the “planning backwards” method, which I find incredibly useful and will definitely use in my classroom someday. It is broken up into 3 parts; identify the desired results, determine the acceptable evidence, and plan the content instruction accordingly. An essential element to the backwards design model is changing up the methods of instruction, this ties in with the MI book greatly in using assignments to cater to every need. Things like visual presentations, writing assignments, even film or picture projects that will allow kids to move and explore are all things that I would use in my classroom. Let’s face it, no one likes a boring and monotonous classroom experience, I certainly didn’t.