Mis-Understanding By Design

I first heard of Understanding by Design when I got a crash course in the "Learning-Focused Schools" initiative. (See http://www.learningfocused.com/) My principal at the time time taught a 2-hour professional development session to myself and 2 other new teachers as part of our induction process. We were brand-new teachers, fresh out of college, no teaching experience beyond day-to-day subbing and student teaching. Those 2 hours were more beneficial to me than 4 years in college.

My love affair with Learning-Focused was short-lived, however. I began to realize that this Max Thompson fellow had marketed a bunch of basic teaching principles and was making millions off of administrators eager to try the next best thing. Essential Questions? They're just objectives. "Beginning with the end in mind"? Well, duh! The teachers I worked with acted like these were novel concepts, but to me, they were just what I like to call "simple logic".

So I decided to dig a little deeper and find out where ol' Max Thompson got his ideas. It was then that I discovered my holy grail as an educator: Understanding By Design. It was everything Learning-Focused Schools had promised, but never fulfilled on. It made perfect sense and it changed me as a teacher.

Now, years later, I am still uncovering pieces of UBD. I learn a little more about it every time I design a unit and wish I could go back and change my first years of teaching every time I discover a new layer that didn't occur to me, but should have.

I spent part of last week out of my building working with colleagues from across my school division on revising our Social Studies curriculum for grade 5. As we went through the painful process of designing Stages 1 & 2 with more than 16 people, I became frustrated with my colleagues' lack of understanding. Later that week, however, during a class that required me to write curriculum for gifted students, I realized that some UBD principles make sense to me on paper, but are much more complex when used in the context of actually creating a unit.

In short, I was disgusted with my colleagues for their lack of knowledge, but was humbled by my own misunderstandings only a few days later. Our entry points may have been different, but neither were closer to putting the entire puzzle together.

I consulted my Chambers Dictionary of Etymology, a favorite among my students, and discovered that the word "understandan" comes to us from before 899AD as an Old English word which meaning (literally) to "stand in the midst of".

 As I "stand in the midst" of several curriculum units in various stages of revision, here are some things I KNOW, but still struggle to UNDERSTAND.

1. Stage 1 is the most difficult, stickiest, time-consuming, and VITAL stage of the unit-design process. Weak Enduring Understandings lead to weak Essential Questions which lead to weak rubrics and performance tasks supported by weak lessons. A good Enduring Understanding can MAKE a unit while a bad one can DESTROY it.
2. Creating a concept map is one of the most arduous and necessary tasks for designers of curriculum. When conceptual understanding reaches graphic form, it creates clarity for the designer, the implementer, and the student who will stand "in the midst" of the unit.
3. While it may be tempting to create a unit independently, teamwork is the best policy when designing a unit. Even if it is just for feedback, a second (or third, fourth, fifth) pair of eyes makes a unit richer, more universally understand, more complex, and more streamlined. This idea is the one that is most difficult for me, as I prefer to work alone and initially do not think a single one of my ideas isn't perfect!
4. There is always someone smarter than you. Elementary teachers, in particular, are trained to be expert generalists. We are rarely content experts and are certainly not working in the disciplines we train students to understand. Tapping into the mind of an expert, even if just by researching, is key.
5. True performance must be measured by action. Performance tasks, while difficult to design and time-consuming to score, are the best way to show transfer of information in students. Pitched high enough (but with support), performance tasks can uncover a depth of understanding in students we never thought possible. The tasks should aim for authenticity, in whatever form that can take, whenever possible so students see the value of the task.

This is only the beginning of my list. I'm no where close to designing Stage 3 in my units so my generalizations stop short of actual learning plans and revision. As arrogant as I was at the beginning of the week, I was reminded how important it is to withhold judgment of others when designing curriculum. As a wise woman once said of me, "She has a lot to learn."

I do.