The most overarching understanding that teachers grapple with is realizing how to best promote student understanding. Teachers struggle with knowing how best to provide the optimal environment in which each of the six facets of understanding presented Understanding by Design can be achieved by their students. How do we best enable our students to explain, interpret, apply, have perspective, empathize and have self knowledge?
To appropriately answer this question, I believe that every teacher needs to self assess their own level of understanding of their content area as well as their understanding of the pertinent applicable educational pedagogy. Content area specialists may be able to employ interesting interpretations and applications. However, many may struggle with explaining, perspective and empathy because of their ‘expert blind spot’ (UBD pg 138). That is, they may struggle with allowing students (who obviously have a less sophisticated knowledge of the topic) access to how their understanding of the topic was attained. Topics that become obvious to content area specialists are still new, exciting and fresh to students. For example, in class today a student asked “Where does pi come from?”. I had always assumed that the old activity of finding the ratio of the circumference of a circle and the diameter of a circle had been done a number of times in elementary school and middle school (it just seemed to easy …. ). I waited and waited for someone to offer an answer. I was surprised to learn that the students had NEVER explored why pi is so significant. Did they ever truly understand the area or circumference of a circle? Now, I can’t WAIT until Pi Day!
Teachers also struggle with the most effective ways to explain. Efficiency is certainly maximized by ‘covering’ the topics through lecture or other forms of teacher based instruction. But, as UBD explains ‘understanding is best acquired by uncovering’ (pg 129) and thus, teachers must be savvy in the teaching methods and strategies they use to best promote student understanding. One of the strategies that I believe promotes students understanding is discovery lessons. However, the execution of these lessons is challenging. Successful lessons are dependent on not only the teacher’s questioning techniques but also their level of patience!
One of the biggest challenges for teachers is crafting a fair, equitable, challenging, yet appropriate assessment to quantify student understandings. UBD seems to be pointing us in the direction of performance tasks and away from the more typical multiple choice, fill-in-the-blank, true-false, etc. styles of assessment. Creating performance tasks can be daunting though! I am looking forward to learning more about how UBD suggests to development of performance tasks in Chapter 7.
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4 comments:
Well written. It's hard to unlearn the years of training we were put through as teachers to take a step back and work a UBD model. No doubt that it makes sense to do it, but it goes against everything that I have been taught.
As (good) teachers, we grapple a lot with how we can have our students reach understanding. Too often we accept that students understand after they pass a written test.
As I read the 3 UBD chapters during the week I thought about math teachers. I keep wondering if I had math teachers using the UBD template maybe the word math wouldn't make me breakout into a cold sweat. You sound like a math teacher who "gets it". Not all students make the leap to understanding and that it will be difficult but doable to design assessments for assessing true understanding not memorization.
As I read different blogs, there seems to be a shared feeling among many- the UbD design sounds great, but it sure seems like a daunting task to develop and implement.
I am a math teacher by default. It is not something I ever set out to be, and worked very hard to become what I consider competent. Having admitted this, I will tell you that I can understand what students don't understand. Math builds and if you miss out on the foundation you will stay wobbly for quite some time until you make the effort to correct it.
What I feel now , however, is that it seems that it is just too easy for students to fall back into "I don't get it" behavior and just give up. I am at a point in my year, and it happens every year, where i teach surface area to students. i am still unable to understand how we can spend weeks doing area problems, pass tests and seem to show understanding and not "get" surface area. Somewhere a connection has been severed and I will continue to search for that place where I can reconnect.
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