Curriculum by Design

Program Standard 9

          This course in curriculum design has shown me that using the Understanding by Design model is both the easiest, most natural thing in the world, and it is also the hardest. On the one hand, it makes so much sense. On the other, it takes a lot of time and energy to produce a quality curriculum. While I have always tried to use this method, this is the first time that I have been able to have the time to fully devote myself to a rigorous application of UbD to a curriculum for students that I know and love. In the past, I have been limited by abstract guidelines for a future, fictitious class. Throughout this class, I have evaluated a known curriculum and adapted my lesson plans to make learning a more meaningful experience for all my students.

Research

            Reading The Understanding by Design Guide to Creating High-Quality Units (Wiggins & McTighe, 2011) put the UbD process into perspective. I liked how this book broke the process down, provided examples, and even recommended an order in which to use the modules. This book was a springboard for other helpful resources. To discover more about learning targets, I found the article “Knowing your Learning Target” (Moss, Brookhart, & Long, 2011) very interesting. While I have posted learning targets for my students for years, this helped me to better understand the necessity of ensuring your students truly grasp what it is they are supposed to accomplish during the class period, just as you would do for a big project. When it comes to instruction, I enjoyed hearing Doug Fisher discuss his gradual release method in a Youtube video titled “Gradual Release of Responsibility” (2013). What I thought was most interesting is that he emphasized that while his initial figure of gradual release was a top-down triangle, and the phrase “I do, we do, you do” gets ingrained in new teachers, Fisher explained that you don’t actually have to go in that order, as long as all the parts happen every lesson. This allowed me to see gradual release in a new light and to think more critically about the responsibility I give my students in each lesson. One of my favorite quotes about teaching is from Cris Tovani in her book Do I Really Have to Teach Reading?, in which she says, “School should not be a place young people go to watch old people work” (2004, p. 20). By making my intentions clear, and holding all my students to the expectation that they can meet the learning standard, I can engage my students, challenge them, and make them see that what we do in my classroom is worthwhile.

Coursework

            The unit that I designed for this class has helped me to rethink the start to my year with my 9^th grade students. For the past three and a half years, I have taught a Western Civilization course guided by nothing more than being handed a textbook when I took over mid-year and being told “it would be great if you got to the French Revolution.” I felt bound to my textbook and the outline from the teachers who had come before me. Now, however, my school is shifting curriculum and I feel like I have the opportunity to re-think the 9^th grade experience. Over the next year, I will begin shifting the course from Western Civilization to World History. This is a daunting task, because World History is so huge! There are so many textbooks, most of them the size of a couple of bricks, and so many recommendations for what “needs” to be taught. By allowing UbD to guide the creation of my first unit for this new direction, I have been able to focus on outlines that will make World History manageable. I hope to teach my course as a series of case studies focusing on deeper understandings. This is supported by UbD.

Through my work on this foundational unit, I have a better grasp of how to start the year off right for my students. I began designing my unit by thinking about what I hope my students get out of it. I want them to understand where our concept of “history” comes from, and how it has shifted over time. I want them to understand the inter-connected nature of our study, and how what we study in one area of the world can be different from another, but that there is also a driving force for stability that encourages people to gather and be social. After thinking about these understandings, I had a better idea about what I should actually teach. I will be reformatting the first weeks of school around this unit.

I also have a better idea about how to ensure my students grasp these understandings. I enjoyed the reminders about constant formative assessment, both from this class and EDU 6613, Standards-Based Assessment. I incorporated many ideas from Wiliam’s Embedded Formative Assessment (2011) into my lesson plans. This includes opportunities for students to reflect on their learning and a variety of ways for them to communicate their learning to me. However, it all comes back to having a quality learning target. If you don’t know where you’re going, you can’t tell your students where they’re going. And if the students don’t know where they’re going, it is highly unlikely you will all end up in the same place. Hattie (2012) writes that for an accomplished teacher, “the primary concern is to add value to all students, wherever they start from, and to get all students to attain the targeted outcomes” (Chapter 4, Prior Achievement section). This is impossible without a partnership between teacher and students predicated on trust and clear expectations.

Standard Alignment

This course is aligned with SPU Teacher Leadership program standard 9, “evaluate and use effective curriculum design.” I feel that I have met this standard throughout the quarter. I began by evaluating the textbook that I currently use in my classroom. I found that while there were many activities and opportunities for students to engage with the material, the lessons provided amounted mostly to reading the textbook and answering some questions. Despite the inclusion of “critical thinking” questions, there were no places in the curriculum for teaching strategies to answer these questions, and if you followed the prescribed lesson pacing, there was no room to fill them in. From here, I began to design my unit, starting with essential questions and understandings, then learning targets, and finally activities to help my students meet these targets. Throughout it all, I collaborated with peers, giving and receiving feedback, and revising my unit accordingly. By designing my unit in this way, I created an effective unit that will engage my students and encourage them to think deeply about historical topics.

References

Fisher, D. [FisherandFrey]. (2013, May 11). Gradual Release of Responsibility [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjURdvzty4c.

Hattie, J. (2012). Visible learning for teachers: Maximizing impact on learning [Kindle version]. New York, NY: Routledge.  

Moss, C.M., Brookhart, S.M., & Long, B.A. (2011, March). Knowing your learning target. Educational Leadership, 68(6), 66-69. Retrieved from http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/mar11/vol68/num06/Knowing-Your-Learning-Target.aspx.

Tovani, Cris. (2004). Do I really have to teach reading?. Portland, ME: Stenhouse Publishers.

Wiggins, G., & McTighe, J. (2011). The Understanding by Design Guide to Creating High-Quality Units. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.

Wiliam, D. (2011). Embedded Formative Assessment. Bloomington, IN: Solution Tree Press.