UNDERSTANDING
BY DESIGN
CNG, September 27, 2010
Goals / Objectives
Introduce and discuss the 3 stages of
Understanding by Design (also known as

Backward Design because you begin with the end in
mind)
Practice creating Enduring Understandings
and Essential Questions

Activating Prior Knowledge
In your groups, please generate a list in two
minutes or less that encapsulates what you
know about the topic you are given
Differentiation of Instruction
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Content—What you teach
Process—How you teach it
Product—How you assess what you taught
Student Interest
Student Readiness
Student Interest
Assessment FOR Learning

Balanced approach to assessment
 Formative—ongoing with consistent, specific
feedback; informs future teaching
 Summative—culminating with specific feedback and
guidance for future learning
 Using a variety of assessment practices

Performance Assessments
 Authentic experiences that require application of
learning in meaningful ways for a particular audience
CNG Assessment Beliefs


Assessment takes a variety of forms
including self assessment, informal observation,
projects, performance tasks and portfolios, oral
responses and reports, short constructed
responses, essays, forced choice items, amongst
others.
Teachers should inform students in advance of
content, concepts and skills that will be addressed
in assessments.
CNG Assessment Beliefs


The type of test/assessment used to assess
learning should be developmentally appropriate
and determined by the nature of the learning
outcomes and the types of learners being
assessed.
In order to maximize learning, feedback on
assessments is both specific and timely.
CNG Assessment Beliefs



It is invaluable for educators to collaboratively
reflect on students’ work/learning in order to
reflect upon instructional decisions and practices.
Assessment is inseparably linked to instruction.
Everything that is assessed is taught and is in the
curriculum.
Effective assessment improves student learning,
and the more we know about our students, the
better teachers we become.
New Information
Understanding by Design:
Backward Design Process

Stage One: Identifying Desired Results
Enduring Understandings
 Essential Questions
 Standards and Benchmarks
Stage Two: Determining Acceptable Evidence of
Learning
 Assessment-Formative and Summative
 Valid, reliable, sufficient, and feasible
Stage Three: Planning Learning Experiences and
Instruction
 Activities
 Resources

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Understanding by Design:
Connection to Differentiation of Instruction

Stage One:
 Content (and Skills)—What we teach

Stage Two:
 Product (Assessment)—How we know students
have learned what we’ve taught

Stage Three:
 Process—How we teach…instructional strategies
and grouping
Applying New Information
Unit Plans and UbD

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Consider a unit/theme that you will do this year
and identifying the Stages: One (Desired Results),
Two (Acceptable Evidence) and Three
(Instructional Plan).
Is anything missing? If so, what?
How might you address or augment?
Stage One
Identifying Desired Results
Enduring Understandings
What do you think this means? Spend a minute
thinking independently or talking with a
neighbor. Jot down your ideas…
Enduring Understandings

Jay McTighe:
Think about the words “enduring understanding.” Enduring:
What do you want to last and why? Five years from now after
the kids forget all the details, after the quiz or the test, what
do you hope they will still understand? Eight years from now,
what do you want them to be able to do with knowledge and
skills that you have taught? That is the idea of enduring.
Enduring Understandings
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Transferable big ideas
Phrased as declarative sentences
Designed to promote student connections,
insights, and applications
Specific enough to guide teaching and assessing
Framed by provocative Essential and Unit
Questions
Students will understand that…
Sample Enduring Understandings
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Scientific knowledge develops through carefully controlled
investigations
Authors do not always say exactly what they mean and mean
exactly what they say
Great artists often break with established traditions,
conventions and techniques to better express what they see
and feel
A president is not above the law
Applying New Information
Enduring Understandings
Your Turn…Consider a unit and develop a few
1.
2.
3.
4.
Represent enduring and transferable big ideas that have
value beyond the classroom.
Express big ideas and core processes at the heart of a
discipline or content area.
Help unpack abstract, counterintuitive, often or easily
misunderstood ideas requiring uncoverage.
Help reveal the big ideas embedded in facts, skills, and
activities.
Essential Questions
What do you think this means? Spend a minute
thinking independently or talking with a
neighbor. Jot down your ideas…
Essential Questions

Jay McTighe:
We like to frame big ideas around essential questions. An
essential question is a question that serves as a doorway for
exploring a big idea, for uncovering the content. And,
therefore, a good essential question typically doesn’t have a
single correct answer, [and] is a question that is debated and
discussed in the field today, a question that can be fruitfully
revisited again and again. And as we revisit the question,
often we go deeper and develop a refined understanding of
the topic.
Unit Questions
Please choose one to answer on your own…
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
What is the definition of history?
What artists are culturally significant in Colombia (or any
country you choose) this decade?
How does the partial products algorithm work?
What are the main ideas of the story The Princess and the
Pea?
What are the three most commonly broken laws?
What are Newton’s laws of gravity?
What traits did you inherit from your parents?
Moving from Unit Questions
to Essential Questions

Essential Questions are:
 Open-ended, interpretive questions
 Go to the heart of your content
 Promote student inquiry, investigation, and
debate
Essential Questions
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
Is history a history of progress?
Does art reflect culture or shape it?
Are mathematical ideas inventions or discoveries?
Must a story have a beginning, middle, and end?
When is a law unjust?
Is gravity a fact or a theory?
Is biology destiny?
Unit vs. Essential Questions
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Provide subject and topic
specific doorways to
Essential Questions
Frame particular content
and inquiry
Should provoke and
sustain engagement of
students
Often lead to the essential
questions

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Are open ended with a
variety of possible
answers
Provoke thought,
discussion and often
raise other important
questions
Should provoke and
sustain engagement of
students
Lead students to the
enduring understanding
of the unit
Essential Qs
Unit Qs
What is light?
How do cats see in the dark?
Is light a particle or a wave?
Is U.S. history a history of progress?
Is the gap between rich and poor
any better now than it was 100
years ago?
Do new technologies always lead
to progress?
Who is a friend?
Are Frog and Toad true friends?
Has it been true in recent U.S.
history that “the enemy of my
enemy is my friend?”
Must a story have a moral, heroes,
and villains?
What is the moral of the story of the
Holocaust?
Is Huck Finn a hero?
Applying New Information
Your turn…
Essential Questions
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
They have no one obvious right answer.
They raise other important questions, often across subjectarea boundaries.
They address the philosophical or conceptual foundations
of a discipline.
They recur naturally.
They are framed to provoke and sustain student interest.
Essential Questions…
Other thoughts

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Use a reasonable number of questions per unit (two to four).
Make less be more. Prioritize content for students to make
the work clearly focus on a few key questions.
Edit the questions to make them as engaging and
provocative as possible for the particular age group. Frame
the questions in "kid language" as appropriate.
Through a survey or informal check, ensure that every child
understands the questions and sees their value.
Derive and design specific concrete exploratory activities
and inquiries for each question.
Essential Questions…
Other thoughts

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Post the overarching questions in the classroom, and
encourage students to organize notebooks around them to
emphasize their importance for study and note taking.
Help students personalize the questions. Encourage them to
share examples, personal stories, and hunches, and to bring
clippings and artifacts to class to help the questions come
alive.
Standards and Benchmarks
Standards and Benchmarks

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CNG curriculum revision process has generated Standards
and Benchmarks for all core curriculum areas.
In ES we selected 3-6 per subject - to focus on in our
planning, teaching, assessments and reporting out for
trimester 1.
Enduring Understandings and Essential Questions flesh out
& deepen St/Bm content/concepts/skills.
Stage Two
Determining Acceptable Evidence
Assessment
Stage Two: Determining Acceptable
Evidence aka: ASSESSMENT

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Valid and reliable measures of targeted understandings
Sufficient information to support inferences about each
student’s learning
Opportunities for students to exhibit their understandings
through authentic performance tasks
Atlas Rubicon provides a drop down menu that attaches
each assessment to standards and benchmarks already
chosen for the unit
Stage Three
Planning Learning Experiences and Instruction
Activities
Your instructional plans

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Students know where they are going and why (knowledge of
unit goals, performance requirements and evaluative
criteria)
Students are engaged in digging into the big ideas of the unit
(through inquiry, research, problem solving, and
experimentation)
Students receive explicit instruction on the knowledge and
skills needed to equip them for the required performances
Students have opportunities to rehearse, revise, and refine
their work based on feedback
Students self-assess and set goals prior to the conclusion of
the unit
Resources
Resources
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Textbooks & Teacher Editions
Handouts
Websites
Student exemplars
Teacher exemplars
Rubrics
List of materials
A final thought…

A key challenge in teaching for understanding is to make the
student's view of knowledge and coming-to-know more
sophisticated by revealing the problems, controversies, and
assumptions that lie behind much given and seemingly
unproblematic knowledge. The work that teachers design
should demonstrate to students that there is always a need
to make sense of content knowledge through inquiries and
applications—to get beyond dutiful assimilation to active
reflection, testing, and meaning making.
Generalizations
Exit Slip
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Please reflect on what you’ve learned just now specifically
related to Enduring Understandings and Essential Questions.
Share one or two big ideas you are leaving with today.
Share one question you still have.
-Understanding by Design PDJulie Hunt
ES Principal
Sept. 27/10