#8: Review of Stage 1

In summary, Stage 1 in the UbD framework should clearly articulate the learning end of the instructional unit. In vernacular, it should describe what we want our students to know, understand and be able to do at the completion of the unit.

It begins with the learning goal (or standard, if applicable) being identified and the unpacking of that goal into its knowledge and skill components.

It also provides big picture anchors like Essential Questions that promote challenging inquiry at appropriate cognitive levels. Through the engagement with Essential Questions, students should eventually arrive at the core learning or enduring understanding of the unit.

The ability of students to meet the learning expectations detailed in the knowledge and skills components of Stage 1 should be indicate their competency relative to the learning goal or standard.

The ability of students to arrive at Enduring Understandings that they can articulate, explain, argue for and defend indicates competency with higher order thinking and their ability to transfer and draw valid conclusions from the learned knowledge and skills of the unit.

From the above, it should be clear that the achievement of the desired learning outcomes is dependent upon (1) the appropriate knowledge and skills being extracted from the intended standard or learning objective, and (2) key Essential Questions being correctly constructed, posed and regularly visited throughout the unit.

#7: Stage 1 - Essential Questions

Wiggins and McTighe offer the following reasons why units of instruction should be built around Essential Questions. They say Essential Questions:

• signal that inquiry is a key goal of education
• make it more likely that the unit will be intellectually engaging
• help to clarify and prioritize standards for teachers
• encourage and model metacognition for students
• provide opportunities for intra- and interdisciplinary connections
• support meaningful differentiation

Essential Questions may be classified as overarching or topical. Overarching EQs offer relevance and transferability across disciplines, whereas topical EQs relate to the topic being studied. For example an overarching EQ could be How are structure and function related? While a more narrow topical EQ on the study of insects would be How does the structure of various insects help them to survive?

Essential Questions normally do not lead to a ready answer. If the "EQ" can be readily answered without much thought and/or intellectual engagement with the material being studied, it is not an EQ. To better understand this, let's look at non-essential questions.

Non-essential questions, while important, should be contrasted against Essential Questions in order for us to truly understand the depth and power of good Essential Questions. Teachers use many useful and necessary non-essential questions in the classroom. These are questions that help lead or guide or even hook the interest of students. They could even be probing questions that are meant to clarify and check for student understanding. Unlike Essential Questions, these questions all have a ready and "right' answer. Here are some examples of useful non-essential questions used in the classroom (based on contextual connotation).

• What did we say was true of all four-sided shapes?
• Is this sentence punctuated properly?
• Why do you say that?
• Why must the answer be less than zero?

Contrast the non-essential questions above with the following Essential Questions. (The overarching EQ precedes the topical EQ).

• How can mathematics be used to measure, model, and calculate change?
• How can we measure, model, and calculate change using fractions?
• Whose story is this?
• How did American Indians view the "settlement" of their land?
• How do authors use story elements to establish mood?
• How does John Updike use setting to establish a mood?
• What are the common factors in the rise and fall of powerful nation?
• Why did the Soviet Union collapse?

In organizing unit plans, have one or two key Essential Questions that will intellectually engage and grow the student's understanding throughout the unit and help them arrive at the Big Idea or takeaway at the end of the unit. Accompany these key Essential Questions with other guiding and probing non-essential questions that are relevant and pertinent at different learning stages of the unit.

#6: Stage 1 - Unpacking Standards

Explicit or implicit in a learning standard are the Knowledge and Skills that students need to acquire. While some teachers are able to read and examine a standard and break it down into such learning components, many may find the following process helpful when unpacking a standard.

• Identify Knowledge and Skills
• Here, we seek to articulate the concepts and skills that the standard is indicating students should be able to know, understand and do. One useful way to start the exercise is identify the nouns the verbs in the standard. One way to do this is to color code the nouns red and the verbs green.
• Identify Types of Learning Targets
• Here, we examine the nouns and verbs in the context of the standard to determine the type of learning targets they imply. For example are they knowledge targets, or skill/performance/reasoning targets.

Let's look at an example by unpacking knowledge and skills from the following Literacy Standard: Trace and evaluate the argument and specific claims in a text, distinguishing claims that are supported by reasons and evidence from claims that are not.

First, we color code the nouns and verbs in the standard: Trace and evaluate the argument and specific claims in a text, distinguishing claims that are supported by reasons and evidence from claims that are not.

From the above, we can draw out the types of learning targets specified by the standard.

Knowledge Targets (Students will know ...)

how to define the concepts of argument, claim and evidence.

Skill/Performance/Reasoning Targets (Students will be able to ...)

evaluate an argument.

distinguish between supported and unsupported claims.

trace an argument in a text.

Once we have unpacked the standard into Knowledge and Skills, we are then able to complete Stage 1 of UbD by identifying Enduring Understandings and developing Essential Questions. Both of these are drawn from the knowledge and skills unpacked. Here are some examples of Enduring Understandings and Essential Questions that could be associated with the chosen learning standard.

Enduring Understandings
An argument backed by evidence is more convincing than just an opinion
Being able to support a claim with evidence is a useful life-long skill

Essential Questions

Why is evidence important?

Why is it important to be able to distinguish between an argument supported by evidence from one that does not?

In general, Enduring Understandings are not explicitly made known to the students. They are recognized (best through aha moments) during and by the end of the unit. They are arrived at through the engagement with thought provoking Essential Questions throughout the course of the unit. Enduring Understandings can be the answers to the Essential Questions.

#5: Stage 1 - Desired Results

Stage 1 of UbD - The Desired Results -  involves the identification and stating of the learning objectives that the unit will be responsible for. For schools using Standards Based Learning (SBL), this will be the learning standards that the unit will focus on.

The learning standard chosen for the unit encapsulates the nature of the content and level of the skill(s) that students are expected to achieve. Very often, a close reading of the standard is necessary to extract and explicitly re-state the standard in terms of content knowledge and skills that may be appropriately assessed as evidence of meeting the standard.

Stage 1 of the UbD framework on Atlas unpacks the standard into the following:

• Knowledge
• Skills
• Enduring Understandings
• Essential Questions

A teacher would be best served by first breaking down the standard into the knowledge and skills that are either explicitly or implicitly indicated by the standard. These knowledge and skill items are what the teacher should eventually assess for evidence of student learning.

The Enduring Understanding is the Big Idea of the standard that we want students to take away from the unit and subsequently influence their future learning. As a rule, the Enduring Understanding is not revealed to the students at the beginning of the unit. It is what they acquire at the conclusion of the unit. Acquisition of the Enduring Understanding grows incrementally through exposure to the knowledge, skills and in particular, the Essential Question of the unit.

The Essential Question can be described as the cognitive stimulus that drives learning towards the attainment of the standard. It is the question that is regularly visited during the unit as students build on their knowledge and skills. Ideally, the quality of student answers to the Essential Question should improve throughout the unit.

In summary, in SBL, all the components of Stage 1 are derived from the unit's learning standard(s).

In the next post, we shall examine how a standard is unpacked into UbD's Stage 1 components.

#4 - The Main Ideas of UbD: Working Backwards

To appreciate the difference of the backward design model in UbD, we need to reflect on what was the norm for curriculum planning and delivery. Content was primarily textbook driven in terms of topics. Teachers "covered" the content during a marking period. Whenever it was time to give a test, they looked at how far they progressed in coverage before constructing questions for the test. The process is sequenced as follow:

• Select topics from the book
• Teach the topics
• Construct test for the topics covered

The Backward Design model begins with learning goals - in our case, the standards the unit will address. The unit standards are then "unpacked" to reveal what we want students to know, understand and be able to do. These are broken down into Knowledge, Skills, and Enduring Understandings. Once we know what we want the students to walk away with at the end of the unit, we design assessments that will provide us with evidence that students meet the standards. Only when we have done this do we design the learning activities and experiences that will best lead our particular group of students towards the learning goals. Contrast the sequence of this model below with the traditional model above.

• Identify learning results
• Determine acceptable evidence
• Plan learning experiences and instruction

Note that the learning goals and the evidence of learning are identified before the learning experiences are designed. All this is also done before the students enter the classroom at the beginning of the unit. It is important to note that while the learning goals and assessments for the unit do not change, the learning experiences and activities may, as adjustments to pace and types of activities are made to meet the unfolding needs of students during the learning process.

#3 - The Main Ideas of UbD: Understanding

In UbD, the point of learning is understanding. Understanding is more that just knowing something. It is the ability to put the acquired knowledge and skills into purposeful use. In their book, Understanding by Design, Wiggins and McTighe use six facets to describe what understanding is. They say we only truly understand, when we -

• can explain - via generalizations or principles, providing justified and systematic accounts of phenomena, facts, and data; make insightful connections and provide illuminating examples or illustrations. 
• can interpret - tell meaningful stories; offer apt translations; provide a revealing historical or personal dimension to ideas and events; make the object of understanding personal or accessible through images, anecdotes, analogies, and models.
• can apply - effectively use and adapt what we know in diverse and real contexts - we can "do" the subject.
• have perspective - see and hear points of view through critical eyes and ears; see the big picture.
• can empathize - find value in what others might find odd, alien, or implausible; perceive sensitively on the basis of prior direct experience.
• have self-knowledge - show metacognitive awareness; perceive the personal style, prejudices, projections, and habits of mind that both shape and impede our understanding; are aware of what we do not understand; reflect on the meaning of learning and experience.                         

A student may know a lot about content and facts without understanding, i.e. without being able to use that content wisely and in context. Such a student will only be able to do things like recall and retell, or simply regurgitate what he has read or seen.

#2 - The Main Ideas of UbD: By Design

How do we design something? It starts with the deliberate and purposeful choice of an end product (or outcome) followed by detailed planning and inclusion of all necessary components, sequencing, and safeguards to produce the end product (or outcome).

In learning, good design is also contextualized in terms of the environment it will occur in. A text book may have a desirable learning outcome and a certain learning pathway, but it cannot claim to have considered the particular learning environment it will occur in.

Let's look at what we mean. Using a textbook as a resource, a teacher goes through the process of teaching a desired learning outcome to students in a classroom. At the end of the process, many students fall short of meeting the desired learning outcome.  To use an engineering analogy, if an end product does not match what was desired, designers would look for a design flaw. Likewise, in education, we will look for anything missed or not included in the learning design. We may examine some of the following: exposure to the learning material; student background knowledge and interest levels; classroom and behavior protocols; individual and/or group activities; motivation and feedback mechanisms; etc.

From the paragraph above, it is apparent that when teachers "design" a learning outcome, they have to concern themselves not only with the knowledge and skills implied by the outcome, but also with the needs of their students. While it may be impractical to meet the needs of each and every student, a teacher that designs learning outcomes within the broad needs of a particular student group can expect greater student achievement through the congruity of curriculum delivery and student reception.

#1 - The Main Ideas of UbD : Overview

Whenever we embrace a certain learning end, we are also embracing the necessary means to that end. Understanding by Design is about the proper alignment of ends and means. UbD is a way of thinking that allows us to correctly and properly identify and align our learning ends and means.  It is a departure from traditional planning in three important ways.

• It is about learning by design. A designer's job involves determining an appropriate end, examining that end in terms of the challenges involved, and then creating a solution that best brings that end to fruition. When an outcome is designed, it is not left to happenstance.
• The point of the end in UbD is understanding. Understanding is more than the presentation of content or the development of skills. It is the ability to do something purposeful with content and skills. In other words, it is about making meaning and  the transfer of learning.
• It follows a backward design model. Appropriate goals are identified first, followed by the determination of what constitutes evidence of goal attainment, before the design of an optimal learning pathway. In UbD, goals, evidence and learning are always aligned and connected.

The foundational material on UbD for this blog is taken from the writings and presentations of Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe who co-authored Understanding by Design in 1998 under the auspices of the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.