Reference no: EM133707719

Homework: Teachers Values

Teachers Certification

Start with the End in Mind

The terms Backwards Planning, Backwards Design, and Teaching for Understanding in the book Understanding by Design (UbD) all refer to the practice of keeping the "end in mind."

In a world filled with data, it is essential to give students the tools needed to decipher and understand ideas. This transferability of skills is at the heart of McTighe and Wiggins' technique. If students can transfer the skills they learn in the classroom to unfamiliar situations, whether academic or non-academic, they are said to "truly understand."

Understanding by Design (Backwards Planning) is a three-stage framework for lesson planning, which helps teachers focus on what learning is most important and how to design a lesson to achieve that. Although you will probably not be required to complete lesson plans for your district in this format daily, you must understand all the thought and planning involved in the lesson planning process.

The following activities and homeworks introduce you to this method, which you will be required to follow for all lesson plans submitted during your internship year.

McTighe, Jay (2013, July 17). What is Understanding by Design? [YouTube video file].

Let's take a few minutes and think about how this planning might play out and jump inside the head of a 5th-grade teacher as he designs a three-week unit on nutrition.

Stage I: Identify Desired Results

Question: What do I want them to have learned at the end of the 45-minute lesson?

In reviewing the health TEKS, I found three content standards:

1) Students will understand essential concepts about nutrition.
2) Students will understand the elements of a balanced diet.
3) Students will understand their eating patterns and how to improve them.

I think that the enduring understanding I want them to have is:

Students will use the elements of proper nutrition to plan a balanced diet for themselves and others. Planning nutritious menus is an excellent way to apply this knowledge and an authentic, lifelong need. Also, there may be some common misunderstandings or gaps in knowledge that I may want to address.

I have found that many students think that if food is good for you, it must taste bad. This unit should help them see all the healthy and delicious food options. The activity will be engaging because anything having to do with food is a winner with kids. They will need some background on cost, variety, taste, and dietary needs that I should also address.

Stage II: Determine Acceptable Evidence

Question: How will you know they have learned it?

Teachers need to design the assessment before the lessons. These assessments serve as teaching targets for sharpening the focus of instruction because we know what we want students to understand and be able to do in specific terms. The assessment also guides our decisions about required versus non-essential content.

In a three or four-week unit like this one, I usually give one or two quizzes, assign a project, and conclude with a unit test (generally multiple choice or matching). This approach makes grading and justifying the grades reasonably straightforward, but I have realized that these assessments don't always reflect the essential understandings of the unit. I tend to test what is easy to check instead of assessing what is most important, namely, the insights and attitudes students should take away, not just nutritional facts. It is frustrating that the kids tend to focus on their grades rather than on their learning. Maybe the way I've used assessments-more for grading purposes than to document learning-has contributed to their attitude.

Now I need to think about what would serve as evidence of the enduring understanding. After reviewing some examples of performance assessments and discussing ideas with my colleagues, I have decided on the following performance task:

The camp director at the outdoor education center has asked us to propose a nutritionally balanced menu for our three-day trip to the center. Using the food pyramid guidelines and the nutrition facts on food labels, design a plan for three days, including meals and snacks. Your goal: a tasty and nutritionally balanced menu.

This task asks students to demonstrate what I want them to take away from the unit and connects to our unit project: analyzing a hypothetical family's meal plan and proposing ways to improve their nutrition. I can use quizzes to check their prerequisite knowledge of the food groups and food pyramid recommendations, and a test for their understanding of how a nutritionally deficient diet contributes to health problems. This assessment is the most complete assessment package I've ever designed, and I think that the task will motivate students and provide evidence of their understanding.

Stage III: Plan Learning Experiences and Instruction

Question: How will you lead them to evidence?

First, I need to think about which TEKS my students will need to understand. They'll need to know about the different food groups to help them understand the USDA food pyramid recommendations. They will also need to know about nutritional needs and the various foods that provide them. They'll have to learn about the minimum daily requirements for these dietary elements and about various health problems that arise from poor nutrition. In terms of skills, they will need to know how to read and interpret the nutrition fact labels on foods and how to scale a recipe up or down, since these skills are necessary for their culminating project-planning healthy menus for camp.

Now for the learning experiences. I'll use resources that I've collected during the past several years-a pamphlet from the USDA on the food pyramid recommendations, an excellent video, "Nutrition for You," and our health textbook (which I now plan to use selectively). As I have for the past three years, I will invite the local hospital's nutritionist to talk about diet, health, and planning healthy menus. The kids pay attention to professionals from the field.

My teaching methods will follow my basic pattern-a blend of direct instruction, inductive (constructivist) methods, cooperative learning group work, and individual activities.

Planning backward has been helpful. I now can more clearly specify what knowledge and skills are essential, given my unit's goals. I'll concentrate on the most critical topics (and relieve some guilt that I am not covering everything). It is also interesting that even though some sections of the textbook chapters on nutrition will be useful (for instance, the descriptions of health problems arising from poor diet), others are not as informative as the brochure and video. In terms of assessment, I now know more clearly what I need to assess using traditional quizzes and tests, and why the performance task and project are required-to have students demonstrate their understanding.

Task

Read the scenario below and using the text block, write the advice you would give this teacher.

A new ELA teacher is so excited to take all of the ideas she learned during her training and use them in the classroom. After a PLC (Professional Learning Committee) meeting, she doesn't plan on using the strategies discussed to work backwards with the team and wants to do her own thing during her class time. This result is her students are not doing well on the common assessment used by the ELA Department.

How would a person who understands some of the basic concepts of Understanding By Design respond to this statement? What should this teacher be thinking about when designing a unit?