Developing instruction using Understanding by Design

Video Transcription

Hello, and thank you for joining me for developing instruction using understanding by design. By the end of today's tutorial, we will be able to answer the following essential questions. What are the three stages of understanding by design? And what are the best practices for each stage?

Let's review what understanding by design is. Understanding by design includes three stages, and you have to go through them in this order to really be doing understanding by design. The first stage is that you want to identify the desired results, which is, what do I want my students to be able to know by the end of this unit? These are going to be based on content standards or learning objectives. And these determine the big ideas for the unit.

And then your essential questions, which are open-ended questions that promote inquiry, are going to be based on the desired results or the big ideas. This also includes the key knowledges and skills, which is, what exactly do I want my students to know? And what skills should they be able to have by the end of this unit?

Then we move on to stage two, which is where we determine acceptable evidence. This is where we determine two things. One is a main performance assessment, which is usually going to be the summative assessment, and one is other evidence. So the summative assessment has to really be an authentic performance or product that the students develop to show that they've reached their understandings.

But you don't want to base your entire unit on one summative assessment. So along the way, you're going to have other products that they're creating to show mastery. And these are going to be your formative assessments that tell you how well the students are understanding the material.

And these are going to be things like quizzes, tests, worksheets, observations, journals, homework, and more. These are also going to be ways that students can reflect on their own learning. Technology is going to play a part in the acceptable evidence because we want to enhance our learning with the use of technology. And then we have stage three, and this is the actual learning plan. This is where the teachers come up with the plan and the actual learning activities.

We're going to look at best practices for each stage, and we're going to start with stage one. Remember, stage one is where you identify the desired results. This is where the big ideas come from. This is where the key understandings come from, and so on and so forth.

The first thing you really want to do is you want to make sure that you're consulting your curriculum standards that you're required to teach. And these might be your school-specific curriculum standards, but more likely, it's going to be the common core state standards. You want to consider the big ideas of the standards that you're going to teach. So what can students take away from these common core? How can I break these down into understandable language? What are the big ideas that I want the students to walk away with?

Then you're going to develop your essential questions. And remember, the essential questions need to be open-ended, and they need to inspire inquiry. You also want to develop the key knowledge and skills that are specific and observable. So these are going to be based on the objectives. And you can do these by creating concept statements.

One way to create a concept statement is to complete the sentence, I want my students to understand that-- and another way to develop key knowledge and skill is identifying the how-tos. So by the end of this unit, my students will know how to-- blank.

Moving on to stage two best practices-- and remember, stage two is where we are determining the acceptable evidence, which is going to be in the form of a main performance event, and also in the form of formative assessments, and in formative assessments that lead up to that main performance event.

So the best practices for stage two are that you want to start off by developing a rubric. And this rubric should incorporate the knowledge and skills as well as the essential questions and understandings. And remember that these need to support the identified standard. And that's most likely going to be the common core state standard.

You also want to either develop a rubric or proficiency scale that identifies the criteria that the student should meet to receive the highest grade on that rubric. You also want to develop the performance task. And the performance task needs to try to meet a variety of learning styles and multiple intelligences, but it needs to be sure that you're actually assessing what the state standard or the school standard is asking you to assess.

And in addition to that performance task, which is the summative assessment, you want to come up with a variety of other forms of formative assessments. These could include quizzes, projects, journal entries, teacher observations, and many, many more.

For stage three, we are talking about the learning plan. And this, again, is how you get from the start of the unit, from the learning objectives, all the way to that performance event. So what are the best practices for getting from point A to point B? Well, one is to sequence your activities very carefully, ensuring that new learning builds on prior learning and experiences of the students and of the class.

You also want to use learning activities that promote group work, collaboration, and discussion. So kids are constantly moving around the classroom, they're meeting with peers who are like-minded, or they're meeting with peers who maybe have a different skill set than they do to provide for some peer scaffolding.

It's all about collaboration. It's collaboration between the students and collaboration between the student and the teacher. And it's discussion based. A lot of these discussions are going to be centered around those essential questions that you've developed for your unit.

You also want to have a variety of learning experiences or activities that appeal to multiple Italian and learning styles. Again, you can't just tell students multiple intelligences are learning style based on looking at them. This is going to take some work in the foreground by the teacher. But it's really worth your while because then you can really have authentic lessons that are meaningful for the students.

You also want to try to use technology to support the learning that's going on in the classroom. But you want to be really intentional with the selection of technology. We're not just using it for technology's sake. It has to be something that's going to enhance the learning.

And you want to reach all levels of Bloom's digital taxonomy. And for a quick review, we're just going to look really carefully at that. So if you remember, Bloom's digital taxonomy is just a web 2.0 version of Bloom's original taxonomy. So at the lower end, you have kind of the repetitious things, the knowledge, the content. At the higher end, where you have evaluation and synthesis, that's where more advanced digital tools are going to come into play.

So again, it moves in the form of a triangle. It starts at the bottom with just bookmarking something that makes sense to the student that reminds them of the learning activity. And it works its way all the way up to where students are actually creating a blog about their learning experience. So you want to try to, in a way, incorporate Bloom's digital taxonomy into your classroom.

Let's take a moment to reflect. Are you currently using any of these three stages of understanding by design in the classroom? Now that you're armed with these strategies, do you think you will use understanding by design in the classroom?

So some of our essential questions that we were able to answer through today's tutorial were, what are the three stages of understanding by design? And what are the best practices for each stage? Hopefully, it's evident to you how understanding by design can be connected to differentiated instruction and personalized learning.

And it does take a lot of work in the beginning to get your classroom set up to work in this way. But once you've put the footwork and the everyday learning starts happening, you'll see that it's actually, I think, much easier to manage for the teacher, even though, like I said, they have to put in a lot of work before the class starts. It just really creates learning that's more meaningful and authentic.

To dive a little deeper and learn how to apply this information, be sure to check out the additional resources section associated with this video. This is where you'll find links targeted towards helping you discover more ways to apply this course material. Thank you for joining me, and happy teaching.