Understanding by Design

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Understanding by DesignBackwards Design

• Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe

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3 Stages of Backward Design

• Identify desired results
• Determine acceptable evidence
• Plan learning experiences instruction.

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Backward Design

• Backward Design focus
• Clarify results and evidence of them before
  designing lessons.
• Teaching for understanding is the goal of
  teaching and compatible with standards-based
  curricula.
• Backward Design is a way of thinking more
  carefully about design, not a program.

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Backward Design

• Thinking like an assessor, not only an activity
  designer, is key to effective design.
• Overcoming the twin sins of aimless activity
  and superficial coverage.
• The work is only coverage or nice activity
  unless focused on questions and big ideas,
  related to the Standards.

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The Understanding

• Insightful use of knowledge and skill, observable
  in performance
• Essential for maximal recall and apt transfer of
  content to new situations
• Reflective, recursive spiral
• Conventional linear textbook-driven scope and
  sequence is a major impediment to developing
  understanding.

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Stage 1 Identify desired results

• Consists of four components
• Content standards
• Understandings
• Essential questions
• Knowledge and skills
• Key Focus on Big Ideas!

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Some questions for identifying truly big ideas

• Does it have many layers and nuances, not obvious
  to the naïve or inexperienced person?
• Does it yield optimal depth and breadth of
  insight into the subject?
• Do you have to dig deep to really understand its
  meanings and implications even if you have a
  surface grasp of it?

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Some questions for identifying truly big ideas
cont.

• Is it (therefore) prone to misunderstanding as
  well as disagreement?
• Are you likely to change your mind about its
  meaning and importance over a lifetime?
• Does it reflect the core ideas as judged by
  experts?

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The Big Ideas

• To determine the Big Ideas for your unit or
  course, ask yourself
• Why? So what?
• What is the moral of the story?
• How is _____ applied in the world beyond the
  classroom?
• What couldnt we do if we didnt understand
  _____?
• Avoid truisms, facts, definitions!

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Essential questions

• Are arguable-and important to argue about.
• Are at the heart of the subject.
• Recur--and should recur--in professional work,
  adult life, as well as in the classroom inquiry.
• Raise more questions-provoking and sustaining
  engaged inquiry.
• Often raise important conceptual or philosophical
  issues.
• Can provide purpose for learning.

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Essential Questions

• Designed to uncover new ideas, views, lines of
  argument.
• Set up inquiry, heading to new understandings.
• Open-ended.
• Cant be answered in a sentence.

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Tips for Using Essential Questions

• use Essential Questions to organize programs,
  courses, and units of study.
• less is more
• edit to make them kid friendly
• post the questions

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Knowledge and Skill

• Students will know
• Students will be able to

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Stage 2 - Assessment Evidence

• What are key complex performance tasks indicative
  of understanding?
• What other evidence will be collected to build
  the case for understanding, knowledge, and skill.
• How will students self-assess?

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Stage 2 is the essence of backward design
alignment

• Measure what we value value and act on what we
  measure.
• Link assessment types to curricular priorities

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Assessment types

• Traditional
• quizzes tests
• paper/pencil
• selected-response
• constructed response
• Performance tasks
• projects
• open-ended
• complex
• authentic

Worth being Familiar with
Important to know do
Big Ideas Worth understanding
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2 Questions for a practical test of performance
tasks

• Could the performance be accomplished (or the
  test be passed) without in-depth understanding?
• Could the specific performance be poor, but the
  student still understand the ideas in question?
• The goal is to answer NO to both!

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Scenarios for Authentic Tasks

• Build assessments anchored in authentic tasks
  using GRASPS
• G-What is the Goal in the scenario?
• R-What is the Role?
• A-Who is the Audience?
• S-What is your Situation (context)?
• P-What is the Performance challenge?
• S-By what Standards will work be judged in the
  scenario?

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Stage 3-Plan learning experience and instruction

• A focus on engaging and effective learning,
  designed in
• What learning experiences and instruction will
  promote the desired understanding, knowledge and
  skill?
• How will you best promote the deepening of
  insight and interest?
• How will you prepare students for the
  performance(s)?

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Organize by W.H.E.R.E.

• W Where are we headed? and why? (from the
  students perspective)
• H How will the student be hooked?
• E What opportunities will there be to be
  equipped and explore key ideas.
• R How will we provide opportunities to
  rethink, rehearse, refine and revise?
• E How will students evaluate (so as to
  improve) their own performance?

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For More Information

• Wiggins, Grant McTighe, Jay. Backward Design.
  New York Prentice Hall. 2000.