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.
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.
