In my first year of teaching, I was replacing a beloved teacher who was on leave fighting cancer. Even though the length of the leave was unclear (it started as a four month contract but I eventually taught her grade sevens all year), she sat down with me talked me through all her materials. I faithfully followed those binders, and sometimes looked at the curriculum for reference. Mostly, I was concerned with what activities I needed to do next and how to get out from under all the marking I assigned. I tried to faithfully cover the content and assignments she planned and was grateful for all the help in my first year.
Over time, I learned there were patterns in how teachers planned. Many teachers thought of some content from the curriculum, decided activities, then made tests, essays, or projects as or after they taught something. In my second year, in a full year contract, I did basically did that, until I attended a planning workshop by the SPDU. They led us through a process where we looked closely at objectives (this was before outcomes, and no, it was not the dark ages) and thought about how we’d assess them. Then we talked about what we’d teach and how we’d teach in order to help students be likely to demonstrate the objective.
Later, I found out this was a part of process designed to make student understanding more likely. The research (now with 25 plus years of research behind it) found that if a teacher is more explicit planning for deep understanding of an objective, students are much more likely to demonstrate it. Seems obvious, right? Teachers Wiggins and McTighe have made a living helping other teachers with the concept, Understanding by Design (UBD), for years. Read a summary of UBD here. I found that if I changed my planning sequence to go from objective, to assessments, to instructional plan, students learned more and understood more deeply.
What is deep understanding?
Deep understanding is knowing something so well that you can do more than just follow a process or say the teacher’s words back. If a student has deep understanding, she can even use that learning in a new situation or context. You get to the heart of the thinking in a discipline when you teach for understanding. Before I might have asked my students to tell me about the causes of the French Revolution. Now I might ask them to use (deep understanding) the causes of the French Revolution to make the case for a place where a contemporary revolution is likely. I learned that I can’t just tell my students “deep understanding.” Read Wiggins describing planning and teaching for understanding. I also learned that the planning sequence in UBD makes it more likely my students will achieve the outcomes.
What is the sequence you use to plan from outcomes?
Traditional planning
- Determine content (sometimes from the curriculum)
- Decide what I will do to explain content to students or what activities they will do
- Give tests, essays, or projects
In planning for deep understanding of outcomes, the sequence is
- Determine what the outcomes asks student to know, understand, and be able to do
- Decide what you’ll accept as evidence that students know, understand, and can do what the outcome asks
- Plan a performance task (read McTighe explaining a performance task)
- Plan instruction that prepares students for the knowledge, skills, and understanding in performance task
Rather the relating current assignments to outcomes after the fact, the UBD sequence ensures you are thinking about the best evidence for an outcome and the most effective way to get students to demonstrate it. It takes more more time initially to re-plan, but saves you marking time and improves student learning each time you teach a class that is planned and assessed that way.
Why would a teacher bother to plan base on outcomes?
The provincial curriculum and division policies require assessment based on outcomes so it just makes sense to plan that way. However, there important reasons beyond it being required. Researchers have found the following:
- Teachers are more focused in their instruction and find it easier to “get through curriculum”
- Students are more likely to be successful in K-12 courses or subjects when they learn this way, because they understand more deeply for themselves and retain more. They also have a better foundation for post-secondary work
- Students are more likely to see their learning as relevant and engaging
- Teachers spend less time marking little assignments
UBD and outcomes are common enough now that both local universities require this method of planning units from students. However, the process is often complicated. Practicing teachers who learned other methods, like I did, need to remember a couple simple changes:
- Read the outcome to determine what you want students to know, understand, and do
- Decide what is the best evidence that a student knows, understands, and can do that it actually is. That’s your summative assessment at the end of the unit.
- Plan your instruction so students acquire the building blogs to do well on the summative assessment you designed as evidence of the outcome.
