Welcome to the Understanding by Design Guide to Creating High-Quality Units.  This post is dedicated to Module A, The Big Ideas of UbD found on pages 3-12.  You may be interested in hearing Jay McTighe introduce this book. I found a 6:40 minute video of Jay being interviewed about the book: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XShVw_afetQ

I found another video of the other author, Grant Wiggins, describing the concept and illustrating the UbD concept with clips of teachers http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsDgfC3SjhM&feature=related .

For those of you interested in the underlying theory and research on UbD you can read this article. http://jaymctighe.com/wordpress/wp content/uploads/2011/04/A_Summary_of_Underlying_Theory_and_Research2.pdf

Now on to the chapter... The Big Ideas of UbD.  The eight key tenets of UbD help to define what UbD is and is not.  The tenets make the point that UbD is a way of thinking about curriculum that goes far beyond just covering the material.  The UbD approach asks us to think carefully about what it means to understand the subjects we teach.  It asks us to think about what our students need to do in order to demonstrate that understanding. Most importantly, it asks us to design curriculum that pushes students to autonomously make sense of and transfer their learning.  

Autonomous understanding is what we see in many of our high achieving students.  They appear to grasp the big idea of the discipline and they work diligently to acquire the knowledge and skills of that discipline.  Wiggins and McTighe observe that many curricula focus on coverage of standards and content acquisition and that such curriculum focuses on the means and not the end.  They argue that curricula can be designed to increase the number of students who see and want to achieve the prize.

Backward Design is the key to UbD; start with the end in mind.  UbD is broken into three stages.  Stage 1 is determining the desired results.  Stage 2 is determining what a student needs to do to demonstrate that he/she has achieved the desired results.  Stage 3 is the planning of the sequence of activities that will enable the student demonstrate the desired results.   

The administrator S.M.A.R.T. goal for this year is focused on creating benchmark assessments.  This is a Stage 2 Activity but we believe that it will focus the entire district on the task of clearly identifying and communicating the learning goals for each marking period.