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Explores how schools and districts can leverage the Understanding by Design model's principles and strategies to improve student achievement, staff performance, and organizational productivity.
What is understanding and how does it differ from knowledge? How can we determine the big ideas worth understanding? Why is understanding an important teaching goal, and how do we know when students have attained it? How can we create a rigorous and engaging curriculum that focuses on understanding and leads to improved student performance in today's high-stakes, standards-based environment? Authors Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe answer these and many other questions in this second edition of Understanding by Design. Drawing on feedback from thousands of educators around the world who have used the UbD framework since its introduction in 1998, the authors have greatly revised and expanded their original work to guide educators across the K-16 spectrum in the design of curriculum, assessment, and instruction. With an improved UbD Template at its core, the book explains the rationale of backward design and explores in greater depth the meaning of such key ideas as essential questions and transfer tasks. Readers will learn why the familiar coverage- and activity-based approaches to curriculum design fall short, and how a focus on the six facets of understanding can enrich student learning. With an expanded array of practical strategies, tools, and examples from all subject areas, the book demonstrates how the research-based principles of Understanding by Design apply to district frameworks as well as to individual units of curriculum. Combining provocative ideas, thoughtful analysis, and tested approaches, this new edition of Understanding by Design offers teacher-designers a clear path to the creation of curriculum that ensures better learning and a more stimulating experience for students and teachers alike.
This book introduces version 2.0 of the UbD Template and allows you to download fillable electronic forms to help you more easily incorporate standards, advance your understanding of backward design, and improve student learning.
"This volume features a set of hands-on modules containing worksheets, models, and self-assessments that are essential for building more polished and powerful units"--
Discover how two of education's most powerful frameworks can team up to provide your school with a comprehensive and in-depth approach to ensure all students are learning at maximum levels. The leading experts on Differentiated Instruction and Understanding by Design explain how to connect these two approaches and use their combined power to: Meet content standards and prepare for high-stakes tests while providing students with multiple learning pathways. Use the backward design approach to develop curriculum units and lessons that can be differentiated in response to students' different readiness levels, abilities, and learning styles. Combine drill and practice with differentiated performance tasks to inspire understanding of content. Create a fair, criterion-referenced assessment approach that supports standards and differentiation. Find out how a curriculum built on the goal of student understanding, integrated with instructional approaches that emphasize reaching every learner, can provide teachers with more specific teaching targets and more flexible ways to reach them.
Discover how the integration of two of education's most powerful frameworks will help teachers impart essential knowledge and skills to the full spectrum of learners.
"Today's seminary instructors are expected to design and redesign their courses more nimbly than in the past. At the same time, institutional rewards for time invested in course design are fewer than ever. Understanding Bible by Design introduces the reader to Understanding by Design: an approach to course design that is proven time-efficient and grounded in the instructor's most closely-held convictions about her subject matter's "big ideas and essential questions." Lester's synopsis of course design and suggested action is followed by a collaborative dialogue with Jane S. Webster and Christopher M. Jones"--Back cover.
This inspirational resource challenges educators to view adolescent literacy as a “civil right” that enables students to understand essential content and to develop as independent learners. Edited by the Vice President of Education at the Public Education & Business Coalition (PEBC), a nonprofit that is nationally known for its expertise in literacy and professional development, the book is a call to action and a practical guide for reform-minded schools and districts, and for teachers seeking to help all adolescent learners achieve at high levels. It is replete with vivid illustrations of exemplary classroom practice across all content areas. It also offers important frameworks to help teachers implement those practices in their own schools. Perfect for professional learning communities, study groups, and individual teachers, this book: Offers schools and districts inspiration and guidance for undertaking a whole-school inquiry about adolescent learning, thinking, and literacy. Shows the specific role that literacy plays in each of the core content areas: math, science, social studies, and language arts. Includes proven tips for secondary and middle school teachers, based on the work of teachers in classrooms where students are achieving at high levels. Provides the common concepts and strategies necessary to help an entire faculty implement the models presented in the book.
