Thank you for joining me today to talk about Understanding by Design. By the end of today's tutorial, we'll be able to answer the question of, what are the six facets of understanding? And what are the three stages of instructional planning using Understanding by Design framework?
Let's get started by doing an overview of Understanding by Design. Understanding by Design is a tool used for educational planning that uses backwards design. And backwards design involves setting instructional goals, then moving towards outcomes, which is how the instructional goals will be assessed, before planning the learning activities.
It's based on the Six Facets of Understanding. The Six Facets of Understanding are based on Bloom's Taxonomy. So remember, Bloom's Taxonomy is a pyramid with the lowest level being knowledge-- and that's a lower order thinking skill-- then moves up towards evaluation, which is the higher order thinking skill. So with that in mind, let's look at the six facets of understanding for Understanding by Design.
The first area we have is Explain. And this is, a student should be able to provide the [INAUDIBLE] recall of facts and data. Next, we have Interpret. Students should be able to tell meaningful stories, provide dimensions to ideas and events, and make subjects personally relevant.
Then we have Apply. Students should be able to use and adapt what they know into other contexts. Next, Have Perspective. Students should be able to see points of view other than their own and see the big picture.
Next we have Empathize. Students should find value in other perspectives and be able to be sensitive to those perspectives based on previous experiences. And finally, we have Self-knowledge. Students should be able to perceive the habits of mind that influence our own understanding. They know what they don't know. This is meta cognition.
These facets connect with the rest of Understanding by Design, because when we generate goals for our students, which is the first stage of Understanding by Design, we want to keep these six understandings in mind. You'll see what I mean when we look at lesson plans created with Understanding by Design more closely.
What are the stages of Understanding by Design? It's made up of three stages. And we're going to start with Stage 1, which is identify desired results. In this stage, teachers identify the established goal, which is the content standard or learning objective, the understandings that will be developed-- these are the big ideas-- and the essential questions. The essential questions are open-ended questions that promote inquiry and understanding.
Teachers also think about the key knowledge and skills, so what content students will know and what skills they will acquire. And these goals should reflect the facets of understanding, which we just discussed.
Next is Stage 2, which is, determine acceptable evidence. In this stage, teachers identify two things, a main performance event and other evidence. The performance assessment-- I'm sorry-- a main performance assessment and other evidence. The performance assessment is an authentic performance or product that students will develop to demonstrate achievement of the desired understandings. This is also the time to develop the criteria by which the performance or product will be evaluated.
Other evidence includes assessments like quizzes, tests, worksheets, observations, journals, homework, et cetera, and ways that students can reflect on their learning. So essentially the main performance assessment is your summative assessment. And the other evidence is your formative assessment.
It's important to note the word "authentic" here, because we want to have a performance event that's meaningful to the kids. When there's no real audience, there's going to be a lot of meaning that's lost. So you want to try to make the assessments as real life and meaningful as possible. So maybe it's creating a newspaper that is distributed to the school, for example.
And then we have Stage 3. This is the fun part. This is when you plan the learning activities. And the learning activities basically need to help us get to the formative assessments, which help us get to the summative assessment. And since the summative assessments are based on Stage 1, Stage 3 just acts as a bridge from Stage 1 to Stage 2.
Let's take a look at a lesson plan example that uses the three stages of Understanding by Design. So Stage 1 remember is identify desired results. What is the goal?
So for this example, students will draft a well-written, five-paragraph essay. I also want students to explain, how can I better my essay writing? We're going to evaluate what constitutes strong writing. And students will use the new writing skills they have learned and will apply them to an analysis of characterization from a short story they have read and discussed.
For Stage 2, determine acceptable evidence, my main performance assessment will be a final draft of a well-written, five-paragraph essay. Other evidence that we're going to do along the way are different aspects of the writing process, journals, quizzes, discussions. And my evaluation methods are going to be observations and a writing rubric that's based directly on what my goals for the lesson are.
For this assignment, we're going to have writing workshops where maybe we talk about thesis statement writing, or how to organize our essays, or what different aspects go into a paragraph, including a topic sentence and supporting details, et cetera. We're also going to have mini grammar lessons where students can work on creating more sentence fluency, for example. So that might be the focus of our grammar lessons, how do we combine two independent clauses, et cetera.
We're going to have a thesis quiz. And the students are also going to generate a thesis. That's going to be part of the lesson plan. And it's also going to serve as formative assessments.
We're going to look at idea mapping and other graphic organizers to help us get our ideas down on paper. We're going to do a step-by-step paragraph writing workshop. We're also going to do a peer editing workshop. And we're going to have teacher-student writing conferences. All of this will eventually lead to our final draft of our five-paragraph, well-written essay.
So let's take a minute to reflect. What is one stage of the Six Facets of Understanding that your students are currently achieving? OK, for our second reflection question, are you currently using any aspect of Understanding by Design when designing lesson plans?
So to review, today we talked about what the Six Facets of Understanding are. And remember, those are closely tied to Bloom's Taxonomy. And we also talked about what the three stages of instructional planning using Understanding by Design framework are.
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 today. And happy teaching.
Overview
(00:00-00:13) Introduction
(00:14-00:34) Understanding by Design Introduction
(00:35-02:06) The Six Facets of Understanding
(02:07-04:09)The Stages of Understanding by Design
(04:36-05:53) Lesson Plan Example
(05:54-06:18) Reflection
(06:19-06:51) Conclusion
Doing Math
This is a grant funded website that explains the six facets of understanding and connects them to Digital Bloom's.
http://doingmath.weebly.com/six-facets-of-understanding.html