Evaluating Lesson Plans: Ubd Planning I

Video Transcription

Hello, and thank you for joining me for evaluating lesson plans using Understanding by Design planning-- part 1. The essential questions that we'll be able to answer by the end of today's tutorial are, how do I evaluate stages 1 and 2 of lessons utilizing Understanding by Design. And what does this evaluation look like?

To recap, Understanding by Design has three stages. For part 1, we're just going to discuss stage 1 and stage 2. So in stage 1, a teacher will establish the goals of the lesson, the major understandings, the essential questions, and the key knowledge and skills that she wants students to know.

In stage 2, she will decide on the performance assessment or performance event for the students. The performance event will include the GRASPS acronym. And GRASPS stands for Goal, Role, Audience, Situation, Performance and Standards.

So we need to go over the process for evaluating stages 1 and 2 of Understanding by Design. You definitely want to try to create guiding questions that you can look at when you're reflecting on your lesson. Here are a few guiding questions for stage 1.

You want to ask yourself, what are the big ideas. And will students take these with them forever? Big ideas are meant to be enduring. Meaning, they're the lasting questions. They're going to be things that the students remember.

Do yours fit this idea? Do the essential questions promote discourse and inquiry? And are they open-ended? Remember, open-ended just means there's not one right or wrong answer.

And discourse needs to be among students. They can also inspire inquiry or the scientific method. And do the key knowledge and skills support the learning involved with the essential questions and understandings? So when you think of your essential questions and your big understandings, the key knowledge and skills that your students are learning have to be directly related to those.

For stage 2, you want to ask yourself, did I use the GRASPS acronym to help create the performance assessment. And also, is there a variety of formative assessments? And do the performance assessments address different levels of the content? And do they account for different learning styles of the students?

So stage 2 is not only the performance assessment, but also the formative assessments, which are diagnostic and help us lead the learners on their way so that they'll have mastery on their performance assessment. You also want to make sure that these are differentiated for the different types of learners that you have in your classroom.

So we're going to look at updating and evaluating a lesson plan using Understanding by Design-- part 1. So we're going to look at stages 1 and 2, how can we update and evaluate a lesson plan. We're going to look at the original lesson plan. And those are going to be our non-examples. And then we're going to look at the updated lesson plan, and those are going to be our examples.

So the original lesson plan is that second grade students are learning about the different zones of the ocean. And for the performance events, students will write a report on a zone that has been assigned to them.

And then the updated lesson plan is that second grade students are learning about the different zones of the ocean. For the performance event or assessment, students will create a puppet show.

So for the major understandings, we just want to make sure, are those big ideas enduring. Again, is this something that students are going to take with them forever? For our example, which is the updated lesson plan, the students will understand where comparing and contrasting is an important skill.

This is an enduring thing. Yes, we're learning about the zones of the ocean. But that's not really what the lesson is about. The lesson is really all about comparing and contrasting and why this is important.

And then for the non-example, which was our original lesson plan, the students will memorize the elements of their assigned zones of the ocean. This is a non-example because it's really on the lower-order thinking skills, because students are focusing mostly on remembering.

For open-ended essential questions, we just want to look at, are these open-ended. And do they promote the discourse and inquiry that is so necessary to have a meaningful learning? So our example is, what is your favorite son of the ocean.

Clearly, this is an open-ended question, because there is no right or wrong answer. It's also going to require some inquiry. Because if students are coming into this without knowing about the different zones of the ocean, they're going to have to do some research.

It's also going to add discourse because students are going to want to discuss the different zones. And one student might really enjoy the sunlight zone and really may not be able to grasp why in the world a student would like the midnight zone. So that's going to create discourse in the classroom.

For our non-example, we have a right or wrong answer question for, why can coral only survive in the sunlight zone. This is obviously not open-ended. It has a right or wrong answer. It might require a little bit of inquiry, but it's definitely not going to generate a lot of discourse.

Then we have our key knowledge and skills. And do these support the learning that's involved with the essential questions and understanding? So our example here is that students should be able to discuss the characteristics of their favorite zone and compare them to others.

So this does directly relate to our key understandings and essential questions because they're comparing and they're contrasting. They're using scientific method. There's inquiry, there's discourse. So it really fits.

Our non-example is, where do angler fish live. This is just a really narrow closed question with the right or wrong answer. It does actually relate to the key knowledge and skills for this-- we'll call it original lesson plan-- because the knowledge and skills are just memorizing. But it isn't an effective lesson.

Then we have the performance event. So we've used the GRASPS acronym for our performance event for the puppet show. So we have the goal, which is that we're going to create a puppet show that discusses the different zones of the ocean and how they're similar and different.

And then we have roles for the students to take in their group work. The audience is an authentic audience. It's not just something they're turning into the teacher. They're also going to be performing for various stakeholders, as well as younger students in the school.

Then we have the situation. And the performance and the situation is just that they are doing a cross-curricular event where they are going to be incorporating music and art and theater and language arts and science. And they're going to be using the skills of comparing and contrasting to create this puppet show that they're putting on.

The performance event is the puppet show itself, a live performance. And then the standards by which they're graded are going to be cross-curricular standards as well as common core state standards for the second grade.

In our non-example, the students will write an essay for a specific zone assigned to them by the teacher. So it's lacking a little bit. There's really no defined role for the student besides that of the writer. The goal is to just regurgitate information onto a piece of paper. The audience is very inauthentic, it's just the teacher, and so on and so forth.

So we can definitely see that while the non-example might follow the GRASPS acronym, it doesn't do it in a meaningful way. So for our formative assessments, we want to just make sure that there is a variety and that they're differentiated.

So in our example, we have a step-by-step process breaking the project into manageable chunks for the students. We also have teacher check-ins. There's also going to be journals. There's going to be quizzes, and more and more and more. So that students who are maybe more inclined to be verbal can prove their mastery of the knowledge through the in-person check-in, while ones who prefer writing might prove their knowledge through the journal entries, et cetera.

For the not example, we just have the final paper and its rubric. So it isn't even broken down into a step-by-step manageable process for the students. It's very clear cut. There's really not a lot of wiggle room. And all students have to prove their mastery through the writing of this paper, which is actually very narrow.

In our puppet show example, we might have a student who can prove her mastery by the creation of sets. We might have another student who can prove his mastery by writing the script, et cetera.

Let's take a minute to reflect on how can you update your current lesson plan or your current lesson performance to include GRASPS. So today, we talked about, how do we evaluate stages 1 and 2 of lessons utilizing Understanding by Design. And what does this evaluation look like?

Now it's your turn to apply what you've learned in this video. The Additional Resources section will be super helpful. This section is designed to help you discover useful ways to apply what you've learned here. Each link includes a brief description so you can easily target the resources you want.

Thank you for joining me, and happy teaching.