If the hypothesis…introduced is true - that any
subject can be taught to any child in some
honest form - then it should follow that a
curriculum ought to be built around the great
issues, principles, and values that a society
deems worthy of the continual concern of it’s
members.
Jerome Bruner, The Process of
Education, 1960, p. 52
 Think about a unit that you
teach.
 What standards frame the
unit?
 What do you want your
students to know and
understand at the completion
of the unit?
 New thinking around curriculum development
 New template built by Standards Leaders
 Backwards design thinking
 Grounded in Enduring Understandings and
Essential Questions
 Common summative assessments
 Authentic performance tasks
 Require critical thinking, “doing the work”,
demonstration of understanding, ability to frame
original response(s) to essential questions
 What specifically do we want students to
understand by unit’s end?
 What exactly are we trying to get students to
realize that is not obvious but important?
 As a teacher,
how do you
determine what
knowledge is
worth
understanding?
 Help to address the common student questions:
 “Why do we have to learn this?”
 “So what?”
 Can be thought of as the moral of the unit
“story” as opposed to the details
 Help us to clarify the “why” of what we are
teaching
Examples of Understandings
An effective story engages the
reader by setting up tensions about
what will happen next.
A president is not above the law.
Correlation does not ensure
causality.
Decoding is necessary but not
sufficient in reading for meaning.
Nonexamples of Understandings
Examples of understandings
Nonexamples of understandings
An effective story engages the
Audience and purpose
reader by setting up tensions about
what will happen next.
A president is not above the law.
The president is part of the
executive branch of the US
government.
Correlation does not ensure
causality.
Things are always changing.
Decoding is necessary but not
sufficient in reading for meaning.
Sounding out, looking at pictures
 Inference drawn from facts, stated as a specific




and useful generalization
Refer to transferable, big ideas having enduring
value beyond a specific topic
Involve abstract, counterintuitive, and easily
misunderstood ideas
Are best acquired by “uncovering” and “doing”
the subject
Summarize important strategic principles in skill
areas
 Enduring Understandings_mov - YouTube3.mht
 Enduring Understandings MUST be
connected to our Learning Standards
 Unpacking the standards leads you to
Enduring Understandings
• Some examples…
 Focus standards for the unit:
 RI 6.2 Determine a central idea of a text and how
it is conveyed through particular details; provide
a summary of the text distinct from personal
opinions or judgments.
 RI6.6 Determine an author’s point of view or
purpose in a text and explain how it is conveyed
in the text.
 RH 6-8.8 Distinguish among fact, opinion, and
reasoned judgment in a text.
 W6.2 Write informative/explanatory texts to
examine a topic and convey ideas, concepts,
and information through the selection,
organization, and analysis of relevant content.
 An author conveys or explains a central idea by
providing details and relevant content.
 An effective summary of informational text is
free of personal opinions and judgments.
 An author of informational text tries to convey a
particular point of view through relevant facts
without bias.
 6.G.1 Find the area of right triangles, other
triangles, special quadrilaterals, and polygons
by composing into rectangles or decomposing
into triangles and other shapes; apply these
techniques in the context of solving real-world
and mathematical problems.
 6.G.2 Find the volume of a right rectangular
prism with fractional edge lengths by packing it
with unit cubes of the appropriate unit fraction
edge lengths, and show that the volume is the
same as would be found by multiplying the
edge lengths of the prism. Apply the formulas
V= l w h and V = b h to find volumes…
 The area of a polygon can be determined by
composing rectangles or decomposing it into
triangles.
 Area is a measure of covering a twodimensional shape expressed in square units.
The area formula comes from the perpendicular
relationship of base and height.
 Volume is a measure of the size of a threedimensional space enclosed within or occupied
by an object. The volume formula comes from
the relationship between the 2-D area of the
base and the height of the object.
 Thinking about the unit you
identified at the start of the
session, frame one or two
Enduring Understandings that
would set the purpose for the
unit.
 How is thinking about and planning
around Enduring Understandings
DIFFERENT than planning strictly based
on standards or objectives?
 How would the resulting lessons/units
differ?
Teaching will entail uncovering the
understanding - not merely
covering it – if the student is to be
more than merely familiar with a
claim and have insight into it’s
meaning and importance.
 UBD Handbook, p. 86
 Overarching
Understandings
 Tend to be general
 Point to transferable
knowledge
 Appropriate at
multiple grade levels,
various content areas
 Provide a link to the
big ideas
 “So what?”
 Topical
Understandings
 Tend to be more
specific to a unit
 Identify the particular
understandings we
hope to cultivate
about specific topics
 Can be “nested”
under Overarching
Understandings
 Art
 Art often reflects the
controversial,
overlooked, or taboo
aspects of a culture;
or novel techniques
and media
 Unit on Impressionism
 Impressionist artists
departed from
traditional painting
forms by using color,
light, and shadow to
convey the
impression of
reflected light at a
particular moment
 Literature
 The modern novel
overturns many
traditional story
elements and norms
to provide a more
authentic and
engaging narrative.
 Unit using Catcher in
the Rye
 Holden Caulfield is an
alienated antihero,
not simply a weird kid
who mistrusts adults.
 History/Government
 Democracy requires
a free and
courageous press,
wiling to question
and investigate
authority.
 Unit on the U.S.
Constitution
 The Watergate
incident, exposed by
the press,
represented a major
constitutional crisis.
 Mathematics
 Mathematics allows
us to see patterns
that might otherwise
have remained
unseen.
 Unit on statistics
 Measures of central
tendency enable us
to find the right
“average”.
 We should eat right and live healthy lives.
 We are what we eat.
 The three branches of government.
 Our founders believed in limited and divided
government, in order to ensure that absolute
power could never occur in government.
 Different countries have different cultures.
 Cultures develop unique traditions and norms
around universal human needs (e.g. food and
housing) and experiences (e.g. celebrations and
mourning)
 Factoring and regrouping are ways to simplify.
 Solving problems requires simplifying expressions
by finding useful equivalent statements by which
unknowns and unwieldy expressions are easier to
work with.
 Artists are always working to be creative.
 “Creativity is 10 percent inspiration and 90
percent perspiration.” (Pasteur)
 Many linear relationships can be found in the
world.
 If you find a relationship in which two variables
are related to each other in a constant ratio, the
relationship can be represented graphically by a
straight line
 What are the
implications for your
planning and your
practice?
 (Break… 10 minutes!)
Given particular subject matter or a
particular concept, it is easy to ask
trivial questions…. It is also easy to ask
impossibly difficult questions. The trick is
to find the medium questions that can
be answered and that take you
somewhere.
Jerome Burner
The Process of Education, 1960
 Definition:
 A question that lies at the heart of a subject or a
curriculum (as opposed to being either trivial or
leading), and promotes inquiry and uncoverage
of a subject. Essential questions thus do not yield
a single straightforward answer (as a leading
question does) but produce different plausible
responses, about which thoughtful and
knowledgeable people may disagree.
 Understanding by Design, 2nd Edition
 …have no one obvious right answer.
 …are meant to be argued.
 …are designed to provoke and sustain student




inquiry, while focusing learning and final
performances.
…often address the conceptual or philosophical
foundations of a discipline.
…raise other important questions
…naturally and appropriately recur.
…stimulate vital, ongoing rethinking of big ideas,
assumptions and prior lessons.
 ... be framed for maximal simplicity.
 … be worded in student-friendly language.
 … provoke discussion.
 … lead to larger essential and unit ideas.
 Are derived from Enduring Understandings
 Are NOT your daily lesson objective turned into a
question format
 May be overarching or topical
 The creation of quality Essential Questions should
form the basis of developing quality assessments
of learning
 What makes essential questions
important in designing meaningful,
engaging learning environments?
 How could dealing with essential
questions change the way your students
approach learning?
 Are there any benefits from the deforestation of
the rain forests?
 Do the benefits of deforestation outweigh the
costs?
 What is nonfiction?
 How much license does a writer of nonfiction
have to make a point?
 What is a life-changing experience?
 Is there a pattern to life-changing experiences?
 What distinguishes impressionism art?
 Why and how do artists break with tradition?
 What types of exercises will improve fitness?
 “No pain – no gain” – agree?
 How does this diet match up with the USDA
nutrition recommendations?
 What should we eat?
 Craft one or two Essential
Questions that would guide
the learning for your unit.
 Given the question, what is the
learning?
 If answers to
Essential Questions
cannot be found,
why bother to ask
them?
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlVuBaPVu
W8&feature=related&safety_mode=true&persist
_safety_mode=1&