Top

Office Chat: Understanding by Design

September 30, 2008 by John St.Clair 

Dr. Beverly EppsWe have a tremendously talented faculty here at the University of Mary Washington. Dr. Beverly Epps teaches in our College of Graduate and Professional Studies in the area of education. I sat down with Dr. Epps the other day so she could share her insights into “Understanding by Design.”

What strikes me in these conversations with our education faculty is how these principles, which are being taught to practicing or future school teachers, are just as applicable in teaching university students both in the traditional classroom or online.

“Understanding by Design” is the title of a book by Wiggins and McTighe and published by the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development in 1998 (with a revised second edition in 2005).  But as Dr. Epps mentions, teaching for understanding has been the recognized aim of many other educators including Madeline Hunter and Howard Gardner, for example. Understanding by design(UbD) challenges the teacher to recognize that learning is more than knowledge acquisition.

Of course, we all want our students to understand, but phrases such as understanding by design can help us articulate and internalize this intention. Therefore, they serve a useful and important purpose, meta-cognition for meta-cognates.

Dr. Epps explains that we can organize our instruction better by actually considering that old student complaint, “when are we going to use this?” Epps asks us to keep the enduring question in mind as we develop our courses. Some have described this as working backwards or backwards by design. In any case, we should rethink our course organization by keeping the end goal (learning outcomes, enduring question, big picture) in mind as we construct learning activities for use in the course.

In the May 2008 issue of Educational Leadership, Wiggins & McTighe aver that

Learning for understanding requires… helping students (1) acquire important information and skills, (2) make meaning of that content, and (3) effectively transfer their learning to new situations both within school and beyond it. – full text available at ASCD

Their instructional sequence begins with a hook problem (Hunter’s anticipatory set), and includes an essential question (Dewey’s perplexity), direction instruction, practice, discussion, revisiting the original hook problem, assessment, and reflection.

Understanding by design is a great framework for developing online instruction for adult learners as well. Knowles theory of andragogy states that adult learners want problem-centered instruction related to their real-world experience. This problem-centered approach makes the enduring question posed in the form of an essential question the hook that draws the interest of the adult learner.

References:

Filed Under: CGPS, FP1, Learning Styles, Methods
Tagged: , , ,

Comments

3 Responses to “Office Chat: Understanding by Design”

  1. Dr. Sanford Aranoff on September 30th, 2008 9:43 pm

    Of course learning is more than knowledge acquisition. We teachers must understand how students think. See “Teaching and Helping Students Think and Do Better” on amazon.

  2. John St.Clair on October 1st, 2008 9:06 am

    Good point and it’s a point of conversation both Beverly and Norah mentioned in my interviews, but I have been trying to keep the chats within 10 minutes limits and therefore very narrowly focused. It is surely worth a chat on it’s own. Interested?

    Thanks for the mention of your book. I spent several minutes reading parts of it this morning – I love the ability to search inside certain books at Google. Thanks for making your work search capable. I like the point about “education is communicating” and “communicating is talking and listening.” Reminds me of Dewey and Whitehead. But my favorite quote is from page 58, “Professors need to know how to interact with students.”

    This is true both in the traditional face-to-face classroom and even more so in the online class. Interaction, both student-teacher and student-student, are two of the seven points in Chickering and Gamson’s principles of good practice.

    As a former math professor, I am very intrigued by the table of contents of your book. You give many examples from math and science in applying your philosophy of education. I look forward to getting a copy and reading in depth.

  3. Lisa Woods on September 5th, 2009 1:38 pm

    I took education courses at Harris Stowe State College in St. Louis, Mo. It was required that I master the understanding of the Madeline Hunter Lesson Plan. I did understand the purpose of the Anticipatory Set. It was the attention Getter, as you say the Hook. Each component of the lesson plan was relevant. But the first question we were to ask ourselves was “What do we want the students to learn?” In our objectives it had to state something that was measureable, what will the child do, say, write, etc. We were required to model, guide, allow independent practice and then have a performance based activity for the assessment. This was in the 1990’s. So when did things change?

    Things changed for me when I became a hired educator and I had to do things the school way. No anticipatory set, no time to model, and guide, and allow independent practice, just do it this way. Teachers must function not only by their own standards but also by the standards of the administrators and the district.

    So I welcome the UbD approach. It is refreshening to me. I just don’t see the logic in teaching any other way. Make the connections and students will learn.





Spam prevention powered by Akismet

                    Bottom