Of all the chapters of Understanding by Design I’ve read up to this point, I found this one to be the most engaging. If you are familiar with Bloom’s Taxonomy, much of what is presented in this chapter will not be new, but reading it made me realize that I have come further than I…
I had a great deal of difficulty with this chapter. It probably didn’t help that my reading of it was rather disjointed — I have two small children here at home, and I probably needed to marshal all my concentration and read it in the library or somewhere quiet. The chapter describes and summarizes the…
I have been quiet for a couple of days as I finished up the school year and did some planning for a summer course I will be teaching the end of July/beginning of August. In the meantime, Grant Wiggins commented on the UbD Wiki post and offered up a nice bit of encouragement for those…
An alternative title for this chapter of Understanding by Design might be “Everything You Thought You Knew about Teaching and Assessment is Wrong.” Perhaps that is somewhat hyperbolic, but not much. I consider myself an autodidact — perhaps not in the sense of being largely self-taught, but in the sense that I have taught myself…
Based upon some discussion about my re-reading of Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe’s Understanding by Design, I created a wiki for those of you who are interested in exploring this book together this summer and sharing our UbD lesson plans. As the authors say in chapter one, “Backward Design,” “In addition to using the UbD…
Chapter One of Understanding by Design is an introduction to the concept of Backward Design, which I think is best summarized in Wiggins and McTighe’s statement that “We [teachers] cannot say how to teach for understanding or which material and activities to use until we are quite clear about which specific understandings we are after…
As I read Grant Wiggins’ and Jay McTighe’s Understanding by Design, I have decided to share my thoughts — my reading journal, if you will, as a few readers expressed an interest in hearing my thoughts about this book. I could be misrepresenting my readers, and please tell me if I am, but I sense…
I have been grading student essays this morning and just detected plagiarism in one of my students’ essays. It’s not the first time a student has turned in a plagiarized essay to me, and I am sure (sadly) that it won’t be the last. On the one hand, I know this student was sick when…
I don’t often apologize for a lack of posting. Contrary to conventional wisdom, my philosophy of blogging is that one should only do so when one has something to say. This philosophy is freeing, in that I don’t litter my blog with posts I don’t care about just so I can keep readers. The year…
One last post, and I’m off to bed. I do, after all, have to teach tomorrow. I had a discussion with my principal about rubrics the other day, and today I read an article entitled “Why I Won’t Be Using Rubrics to Respond to Students’ Writing” by Maja Wilson (in English Journal, March 2007 —…
