Susan on Understanding by Design: Standards are potentially very useful on many levels, and certainly the backward design idea is at the heart of the movement at its best. Having sat on standards-writing commissions, complex instructional design, and ordinary lesson-planning sessions of my own and with teachers, I also believe that it is essential to know what the students are supposed to come away with. The outcome determines the steps that need to be taken to bring the students there. So many times, teachers and materials fail to recognize that intermediate steps have been omitted in the lesson, and the desired result is not forthcoming. For example, teaching elementary students about latitude and longitude with the goal of having them identify cities by their coordinates is a clear goal, but the requisite steps to get them to be able to do that are missed on the September Map Skills pages in every social studies book. We have to realize that we are asking students to understand and be able to use a four-quadrant grid, when they may not yet be familiar with the idea of coordinates at all. It is necessary to start with “Bingo” and go through the intermediate steps to the complex system that gives us the Global Positioning System. Another part of the skill is the divisions of degrees on a compass or clock apparatus. It is too easy to think of the end without breaking it down into components.
There are teachers who teach their subject, and there are teachers who teach kids. They are not mutually exclusive, but the former could teach just as well to an empty room. The Stages of Backward Design model looks simple at first, and has certainly come to be incorporated in instructional design of late. The model hides within it, however, a lot of complexity, because there are scales at which instruction functions: the “desired results” include demonstrable skills, knowledge, and concepts. So instruction is not linear, but moves up and down scales, zooming in and out from smaller to larger fields of vision. Fig 3.3 illustrates these multiple scales in one possible way (p. 71). By the end of the book, the process seems so complex that it threatens to engulf its subject. I may be very wrong, but the elaborate discussion of understanding seems like a huge detour.
It was surprising that the example of nutrition featured a standard that was governed by the vague and unmeasurable verb “understand” The essential questions were quite diffuse, and the “understandings” only gave way to performance-based goals as three skills objectives (headed up by “students will be able to read and interpret…analyze…plan.”) Instead of performance objectives like these, performance tasks were laid out. The sequence of learning experiences was quite exhaustive, however. The three stages laid out in the UbD standards are a very tall order, but do make sense as an aspiration to attain. The wrenching title of chapter 2 “Understanding Understanding” testifies to this embedded problem. What good design ought to do—if the goal of learning is unfortunately stated that way—is to tease out what student performance will provide evidence of that understanding. This has to involve action verbs, like “explain, list, describe, organize, identify, etc., bringing the designer into Bloom’s taxonomy territory. The book, on p. 36, again goes past these specific verbs by telling the designer that benchmarks are formulated with the phrase “students know, or students know how.” This just adds another layer. HOW do we assess that students know and understand? Because they can show us by doing something, they couldn’t do unless they know and understand. I think it adds an extra layer. Cut to the chase. A huge amount of the book is devoted to unpacking understanding, and I believe that an overly complex schema is laid out that would be horribly intimidating to the teachers who use it either to actually design lessons, units and yearly plans. In working with teachers, I have found that it is extremely difficult to get them to go through complex superstructures like this.
Wiggins and McTighe are respected experts on this, but to me their analysis of broad and narrow standards falls short, and makes the mistake that many critiques of standards make. That is the failure to note that all of the national standards documents (looking especially at history) represent levels or hierarchies of specificity. As they state, there are separate skills standards that are really prerequisites for gaining knowledge. There are broad knowledge standards that encompass major areas of focus, and these are then broken down into bullet items on what students do to engage with this broader material. At the most specific level are exemplars that suggest activities for the classroom. No standards document is inclusive of these. Some of these national and state documents are good teaching guides, useful and intelligible, while others take existing knowledge standards, for example, and dis-integrate them by tossing them up on graphic organizers. They are most assuredly not equal from document to document.
Wiggins and Tighe, as well as Calder in his specific way, seek to provide answers to some of Wineburg’s deep questions. They break down the process to create a reproducible technique for designing lessons that ideally can be applied by any teacher or instructional designer. In education schools everywhere, I imagine, teachers are diligently trying to absorb and apply this method in excruciating detail. I am sure it is helpful, but I fear it is too complex to affect change in more than a general way, and I am even more worried that the design process will become codified into another jargon-based recipe that education colleges and education bureaucracies will beat into a dead horse. It isn’t that I want to dismiss it, but it runs the risk of being so refined that it pulps the creativity out of lesson design. The test mavens, on the other hand, will find in it evidence that their assessment items that involve bubble sheets can be proven to give the desired results. Like the guy on the Internet who put out a challenge that he can develop a lesson on anything using Legos®, the people in the testing business will claim that their assessments, can demonstrate learning if their process of backward design is followed. It is an odd form of teaching to the test. Having said that, there is much to think about in Wiggins and Tighe, if it doesn’t get imposed on one mechanistically.
I have heard some of these criticisms from teachers who were assigned Understanding by Design in their education courses–especially the one about being overwhelmed by the model. My response to them is to focus on the central premises, rather than on the details. Designing a course in reverse leads (or at least can lead) to some very interesting outcomes for the students.
I also like your point about the approach in this book being a round about way of “teaching to the test.” I’d like to discuss this some more in class tomorrow.
Comment by mills — September 11, 2006 @ 9:41 pm
I think much of what you eloquently wrote here is what I fumbled to express in my post. The idea of going backward rather than forward still denotes a linear and immutable path to learning. I agree it is almost certainly a better method when a very secific and concrete end is apparent (i.e. a knowledge standard which will be assessed by an exam), but seems less useful on other levels. Maybe I am too ambivalent here, but while it seems like an obviously positive methodology something lingers in me that it lacks real differences.
Comment by Ken — September 12, 2006 @ 5:56 pm