UNDERSTANDING BY DESIGN

CHAPTER 1: BACKWARD DESIGN.
Backward design points out that teachers have to start with an end- the desired results (goals or standards) then derive the curriculum from the evidence of learning (performances) and finally plan learning experiences and instruction to promote understanding. Students’ needs are priorities where instructional strategies and assessment revolve around them.
Teachers, unlike other professionals, are the ones who have the role of encompassing every stage of a process to make it successful. There are some professions which divide duties to achieve an objective. For instance, regarding the process of constructing a building, architects are in charge of designing the plan of it. After that, engineers play the role of working out materials which are going to be used and finally builders construct the building. Many professionals are responsible for the project.
On the contrary, talking about education, “effective” teachers should be in charge of the whole process. We should decide upon learning objectives. When the objectives are clear, we should create rubrics which reflect what we expect students to learn and should consider students’ needs without loosing the objective. Finally, we should collect material and plan the lesson and the assessment. A difficult task, doesn’t it?
Unfortunately, this way of seeing teaching is not shared by some teachers. They focus their classes on covering contents which are meaningless, they skip stages and to make the matter even worse, they do not reflect on their classroom practices. Why? I dare to say that this situation happens because teachers are used to teach the way they were taught in school. Their previous experiences marked them.
To conclude, I would like to say that the only way to stop this vicious circle is to share this design with our colleagues and start using it in our classroom practices. In other words, we have to become role models who look for a higher education. Don’t you think?

UNDERSTANDING BY DESIGN. CHAPTER 8

Criteria and Validity

The pursuit of developing a higher education has asked teachers for a systematic and thoughtful student learning assessment. This kind of assessment is based on judgment guided by criteria which highlight the most revealing and important aspects of a work. Appropriate criteria must clarify a set of independent variables in the performance that affect our judgment of quality. The criteria specify the conditions that any performance must meet to be successful. Unfortunately, most teachers frequently rely on criteria that are easy to see so they do not develop understanding in students. What is correct and what is wrong are formulas which are possible to apply but not effective because they do not foster critical thinking.
Summative assessment is the most difficult task because it implies subjectivity. As teachers, we pay too much attention to correctness because it makes assessment easier and seemingly objective. However, doing so hindering students to make judgments and finally understanding is not achieved. Validity appears as another problem when we are referring to subjectivity mainly because our beliefs interfere with the objectiveness of our evaluation.
It is also a problem to decide what criteria performance should be judged and discriminated. One of the most important things is to remember that if our aim is to evaluate understanding and proficiency, criteria have to be derived from the desired results of stage 1.
Rubrics become an appropriate way of assessing performance depending on how they are used. According to the authors, there are two kinds of rubrics: the holistic and the analytic. In order to help parents and students to understand their performance in tests, the most recommended rubric is the analytic one because it shows you the information in detail. My question is: Is that information valid?
To sum up, assessing is an issue which is not easy to resolve. Validity plays a very important role if the assessment aims at understanding. Nevertheless, most of teachers believe that validity sometimes seems like a maze because it is difficult to find a way out to accomplish it.

Understanding by Design

THINKING LIKE AN ASSESSOR

In this chapter, we move on from the first stage to the second stage. In this stage, it is vital to think as an assessor rather than a teacher. The purpose of assessment is to provide teacher and student with information and insights to improve teaching effectiveness and learning quality. There are three questions which teachers as assessors have to ask ourselves before designing a particular test or task. This chapter is focused on the first question which is connected to the kind of evidence needed to assess a variety of learning goals generally and understanding specifically. As teachers, we tend to design lessons, activities and assignment without thinking about the performances and products we need to teach toward. If we skip this stage our design is going to be less coherent. Effective assessment includes lots of evidence using a variety of methods and formats which are informal checks for understanding, observations and dialogues, tests and quizzes, academic prompts and performance tasks. During performances, the teacher has to provide students with authentic problems rather than exercises out of context in order to have transferability. The authors suggest framing performance assessment using six facets which help us in finding the right kinds of tasks and also using GRAPS which refines each task to ensure its authenticity.
Unfortunately, it seems to be that teachers’ beliefs are complex barriers which hinder us from achieving this approach to assessment. We are more concerned about grading than providing evidence of our students’ understanding. What is more, we are used to frame our assessment in knowledge which is not meaningful at all.
If we want to succeed in assessing students, we have to be able to put this approach to assessment into action. It is a difficult task and takes time but it will bring fruitful results.

UNDERSTANDING BY DESIGN. CHAPTER 3

Gaining clarity on our goals

The statement “life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forward” contains two opposite ideas that make it seems impossible. However, it is probably true when we are talking about education. Backward design begins with an aim in mind. It really helps us to teach for understanding. In this design, we, teachers become the designers who articulate the goal right from the beginning in order to be quite clear about which specific understanding we aim at and how it would be performed in practice. The basic steps to follow are deciding on themes, enduring understanding, aligning units with standards and choosing outcomes, strategies and best practices to teach students. It has to be said that many designers have struggled with problems of standardization for educational planning such as the number of contents versus the time available to learn them, the size of standards and vague specification of them. Identifying big ideas and core tasks within standards is indispensable to get through these problems. Choosing resources to create a rich and engaging unit and weaving back and forth across the curriculum map to make revisions and refinements are important too.

How we can design an assessment or instruction before teaching a unit is an important concern which teachers have to deal with. To succeed in this task, we have to decide on what is essential for students to know, what is at the core of the heart of our discipline and then decide on how we would know when students have reached the goal. Considering the template, it helps us to differentiate Establish Goals, Understanding, Essential Questions, Knowledge and Skills which are different but in practice they might overlap with each other.

Theoretically, everything sound obvious but practically we do not take these issues into consideration as we should. Don’t you think?

Chapter 5

Essential Questions: Doorways to Understanding

Given particular subject matter or a particular concept, it is easy to ask trivial questions…. It is also easy to ask impossibly difficult questions. The trick is to find the medium questions that can be answered and that take you somewhere.

Balance is the condition which has to be present in a design of a course or a unit if the goal is to achieve understanding. Facts, skills and big ideas have to be connected in order to enable students to be engaged in and inquire about what they learn.
Talking about Chilean education, Is the curriculum on balance? Are teachers concerned about this problem? How does the sociopolitical pressure affect on the pursuit of balance?
Framing our work in Essential Questions will enable us to find the appropriate balance to succeed in the pursuit of understanding. These questions dig for the real riches of a topic which are beyond simple announcement of a text or teacher- talk. Their existences are long- lasting and they do not look for a “right” answer but they look for learning how to learn. They also look for hooking and hold the attention of the students.
The intention of essential questions plays a very important role. What is the result that we expect from students of the learning activities and assessment? All depends on how questions are posed and the nature of the follow- ups. Teachers do not realize that teaching skills is just an excuse to develop self- sufficiency. I have met many teachers who believe that their only task as teachers is to provide students with facts. They are concerned about teaching the structure of contents and cover all the units, avoiding transferability across disciplines, big ideas, core content and deep thoughts and as a result, the design becomes incoherent and without connection.
As a conclusion, framing a course or unit in only one kind of questions does not guarantee understanding. In fact, understanding encompasses a mixture of topical, overarching, guiding questions and open inquires which are interrelated making the design more effective.

UNDERSTANDING BY DESIGN

Understanding by design is an academic framework for designing curriculum units, assessments and instruction which tries to achieve understanding beginning with end goals in mind. The problem arises when understanding is defined. Most of the time, understanding and knowledge are confused or used as the same term. However, they are opposite. The aim of understanding is to use what learners have in memory but to go beyond the facts and approaches to use them mind fully. The ability needed to achieve this aim is transfer. It conveys what learners have learned to new and sometimes confusing settings. Transfer must be the aim of all teachers in schools in the sense students have to learn from their own and not from us.
There are two approaches, the traditional coverage and the uncoverage approach. The former is uneconomical because the acquired knowledge is going to be forgotten due to it has an unconnected set of facts which have a short life in memory. Teachers have the assumption that the more they cover, the more students will learn and the better students will do on their test. However this assumption is false. The latter approach digs below the surface to uncover core insights in order to endure learning in a flexible and adaptable way for the future.
The outcome of the concept understanding design is the backward design which is focused on the idea that the learning process should start after identifying the desired results and then work backwards evolving suitable methodologies.
Specification of what kind of assessment evidence is required if teachers will judge students’ understanding because correct answers do not mean understanding but misunderstanding. It is an attempted and plausible but unsuccessful transfer.
As a conclusion, the authors introduced an effective and engaging framework which includes us all.