Reflection 3.2 - Designing Instruction
The "Understanding by Design" process
Overview
Whether you are creating your own curriculum, adapting a pre-existing curriculum, or directly following an existing curriculum, you still have to do some design. For example, you will need to decide which learning activities/assignments students should do and decide how to assess student learning and assign grades. This unit addresses key ideas of instructional design.
As most of you know, I was a education major as an undergraduate [Math and science education. I spent four years as a middle school teacher.] I suspect that I had coursework in the College of Education and in my discipline specific Methods classes that talked about how to design instruction. But if I am very honest with you, I don't remember any of that. I mean, I clearly made it through four years of teaching middle school and 20+ years of teaching college computer science so I must have learned SOMETHING. But I don't remember what I was formally taught. As a young teacher much of my instructional design was designing lessons and several weeks later scrambling to write a test about what I had been teaching for the last few weeks. If I am honest, it wasn't always as organized or as effective as it could/should have been.
And from a lot of my experiences talking with in-service teachers I think that they often feel this same way.
It wasn't until about 2017 when we started designing the CSEd program at UNI that I really started to THINK about what it means to DESIGN Instruction. In the process I did some reading that absolutely revolutionized how I think about teaching and learning and the importance of designing from the big picture down to the small details rather than the other way around. In developing this unit, this course, heck, even this whole five course curriculum program, we have used two texts:
- Understanding by Design by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe (1st Edition, 1998)
- Grading for Equity: What is is, Why it Matters, and How it Can Transform Schools and Classrooms by Joe Feldman (2019)
I STRONGLY encourage you to track those books down at some point and read them at your leisure. But you need not read them for this course. We will provide you with links to the key ideas to get you started.
Readings
In this set of readings I want you to read about the educational design framework known as "Understanding by Design" as described by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe.
- The front page of the "Understanding by Design" website at Vanderbilt.
- Please include viewing the 10 minute video in this process
- A slightly more detailed white paper on the process.
- Chapter 6.0-6.3 in the Wilson textbook
- While this doesn't talk explicitly about the UbD process it helps frame why I think it is so important/helpful.
Reflection
As I did in Reflection 3.1, I am not going to collect a written reflection prior to coming to class. BUT, you should come to class prepared to answer the following questions we will use in our discussion.
- Why is "Understanding by Design" sometimes called "Backwards Design"?
- What are the three stages in the design process?
- How does this compare to how you think (have been taught) about instruction in your education classes?
- Given what you read, what do you think a teacher would need to start the process in their classroom?
- What do you think is good about the process?
- What do you think would be challenging about the process?
Again, I encourage you to jot down notes and thoughts about these questions. You might even formally answer them prior to coming to class so you have REALLY thought about the issues. But I will not collect your answers.