Understanding By Design - KeynesYouDigIt/Knowledge GitHub Wiki
Intro
- Big Idea: A concept, theme, or issue that gives meaning and connection to discrete facts and skills.
- Curriculum: A blueprint for learning derived from desired results. It's content shaped into a plan.
- Assessment: Determining the extent to which the desired results are on their way to being achieved. It's giving and using feedback against standards.
- Understanding: Make connections and bind together our knowledge into something that makes sense of things.
Knowledge and skill do not automatically lead to understanding.
Backward Design
- The purpose of a lesson is to make learning more effective
- Standards help us prioritize
- How do you distinguish interesting learning from effective learning?
- Curriculum should lay out the most effective ways of achieving specific results
- Prioritize outputs over inputs, learning over teaching, understanding over content
- "Toward which performance goals do this readings and lessons head?"
- How will students see what the purpose of their work is?
- We are coaches of their ability to play the game, not tellers of our understanding on the sideline
- How will you build a shared understanding on which future lessons might build?
Twin Sins of Traditional Design
- Activity-oriented design- "Hands-on" but not "Minds on"
- Fun and interesting, but don't lead anywhere intellectual
- Coverage - "Teaching by mentioning it"
- Distinguished from "purposeful survey"- you can get students an overview if you're clear about the goal
Three Stages of Backward Design
These need to eventually make sense sequentially, but don't necessarily need to be completed sequentially.
- Identify desired results
- Have clarity about priorities
- Determine acceptable evidence
- What counts as evidence on the field, not just in drills?
- Plan learning experiences and instruction
- What enabling facts do they need to perform?
- What activities will equip them with knowledge and skills?
- What needs to be taught and coached, and how can those be most effectively done?
1-Page Backward Design Template
- W - Where's the unit going, what's expected?
- H - Hook students and hold their interest
- E - Equip student to experience the key ideas and explore the issues
- R - Provide opportunities to rethink and revise
- E - Allow students to evaluate their work and its implications
- T - Be tailored to different needs, interests, and abilities
- O - Be organized for maximum initial and sustained engagement
Backward Design Standards
These measure the quality of the backward design.
Overall: To what extent is the entire unit coherent, with the elements of all 3 stages aligned?
To what extent does the design focus on the big ideas of targeted content?
- Are the targeted understandings enduring, transferrable, big ideas?
- Are the targeted understandings framed by questions that spark meaningful connections and deep thought?
- Are the essential questions provacative, arguable, and likely to generate inquiry instead of a pat answer?
- Are appropriate goals identified?
- Are valid and unit-relevant knowledge and skills identified?
To what extent do the assessments provide fair, valid, reliable, and sufficient measures of the desired results
- Are students asked to exhibit understanding through authentic performance tasks?
- Are there appropriate scoring tools for products and performance?
- Are various assessment formats used to provide evidence of learning?
- Are assessments used as feedback as well as evaluation?
- Are students encouraged to self-assess?
To what extent is the learning plan effective and engaging?
- Will the students know where they're going, why the material matters, and what's required of them?
- Will they be hooked?
- Will they have adequate opportunities to explore and experience big ideas?
- Will they have have sufficient opportunities to rethink and revise?
- Will they have time to reflect on their work, their learning, and their goals?
- Is the learning plan flexible for the interests of all students?
- Is the learning plan organized and sequenced for maximum engagement and efficacy?
Understanding Understanding
Understanding is facts acquiring meaning for the learner, seeing their relationship with other things. A tile is a fact, a pattern of tiles is an understanding. Understanding is about transfer. Transfer is the essence of Bloom's "application" level verbs.
Bloom's definition of a new problem:
- You have not received instruction or help on the problem and you have to do some of the following:
- The statement of the problem must be modified in some way before it can be attacked
- The statement of the problem must be placed into a model before the student can apply generalizations to it
- The statement of the problem requires the student to search their memory for relevant generalizations
Understanding requires knowledge and skill. It's the difference between borrowing an expert's opinion and an internalized, flexible idea.
There are 3 uncoverings we need to do:
- Uncovering student's potential Misunderstandings, through: Focused questions, feedback, diagnostic assessment
- Uncovering the questions, issues, and assumptions and gray areas underneath the surface
- Uncovering the core ideas at the heart of understanding that are not obvious or counter-intuitive to novices
Once we're clear about what students should eventually understand (which is difficult), we need to be clear about what counts as sufficient evidence. This breaks into two questions:
- What type of work are we looking for?
- What are we looking for in the performance (regardless of what it is) that will allow us to judge the degree of understanding?
We need to craft assessments with transferrability in mind. This requires the students to demonstrate flexibility of knowledge.
Different instructional approaches look identical when measuring only memory, and only diverge when you start measuring the transfer.
Misunderstanding is not ignorance; it's the mapping of an idea to a new situation in a plausible but incorrect way. It actually requires knowledge and the ability to transfer.
Gaining Clarity on Our Goals
Goals represent a complex mix of academic aims:
- Factual
- Conceptual
- Procedural
- Dispositional
- Expert-Performance
Our long-term goals are fundamental to focusing our short-term goals on what's important and not fracturing attention. Being driven by "essential questions" is at the heart of understanding. You won't ever have a final answer to the questions, but the serious pursuit of them is what the more concrete goals are driving you toward.
Differentiate skill goals ("Do this discrete thing") from performance goals ("Do this complex and integrated thing well"). The college mistake is to specify performance goals without developing the skills first (including practice, feedback, remediation). Instructors assume that students have good study skills, public speaking, graphic design, group management, etc. skills, and don't help them develop them. You will need to tailor assessment to the right level- you may be able to assess knowledge with cheap tests, but you'll need guided practice for skills and authentic performances to assess the performance goals.
The standard goldilocks problem:
- There are too many standards (1996 study found that teachers would need 9 more years to teach all state standards if they only spent half an hour on each one)
- The standard is too big for anyone to meet
- The standard is too small ("Factlets") to be important
- The standard is worded so nebulously that it will be interpretted differently by every teacher
To unpack a standard, look at the key recurring nouns, verbs, and adjectives. You're looking for an abstract, transferrable understanding.
Big Ideas
"Conceptual velcro", the linchpin that holds the wheel on the axle. They're chosen for their power to explain wide varieties of ideas.