Understanding by Design and Essential Questions

            Understanding by Design relies on what Wiggins and McTighe call “backward design”. Teachers using this strategy traditionally start curriculum planning with activities and textbooks instead of identifying classroom learning goals and planning towards that goal. In backward design, the teacher starts with classroom outcomes and then plans the curriculum, choosing activities and materials that help determine student ability and foster student learning. “Teaching for understanding” is another central premise of Understanding by Design. Teachers should tell students about big ideas and essential questions, performance requirements, and evaluative criteria at the beginning of the unit or course. Students should be able to describe the goals (big ideas and essential questions) and performance requirements of the unit or course. While I was reading this article, I noticed how many great examples were used and how helpful they were in understanding the topic even better. Also, the examples of poor strategies and curricula were very useful. They gave a good visual of things to avoid when in the classroom, and helped to compare them with more effective strategies and to understand what makes certain methods effective and others not so effective.

            Essential questions are extremely important, as they reflect the big ideas and understanding goals of the unit. To me, an essential question is when a teacher opens a whole new world to the students. It leads to a higher order of thinking by pulling out content knowledge, connecting the knowledge to the topic at hand and seeing how one can improve. This is the best way to get students to understand what they are studying and learning, and how they can apply it and use it. I thought the article was very clear and informative. It outlined “big ideas” and how to use them effectively, examples of essential questions, specific understandings, and how to distinguish between essential questions and more common nonessential questions. Another thing that was highlighted was great essential questions from each subject, which I found to be very helpful in understanding how to go about writing and using them in our specific content area. The section on framing understanding was also very helpful. It taught us that understandings are the specific insights, inferences, or conclusions about the big idea you want your students to leave with. And because they can be gained only through “guided inference” whereby the learner is helped to make, recognize, or verify a conclusion, they are thus not “teachable” facts. I found this piece of information to be slightly surprising and very helpful at the same time, as it gives us a better understanding ourselves on how students actually come to understand and comprehend what they are learning and doing. Overall, I found both articles to be informative and certainly a great tool and resource for teachers and future teachers and educators.