Teaching Backwards

I believe chapter one of the UBD reading to be the most insightful reading regarding teaching for me. At first I didn’t understand what exactly UBD meant, until reading further as it clarified the “understanding by design”. Through this reading, I believe understanding by design concerns how to get students to understand the content by a unique instructional design/approach. The instructional design this chapter refers to is the “backward design”.  As a future teacher, I was eager  to learn about how there are different ways to go about an “assessment” that differs from the traditional “teach and end instruction with assessment”. With this backwards design, it helps the teacher gain insight on what the student already knows and sharpening the teacher's focus from there by framing their unit or course on how to get one’s students from what they already know to what the teacher wants their students to gain an “understanding” of by the time the unit or course comes to a close.

As this chapter gives insight on a backwards approach towards assessing and teaching, it continued to explain different sorts of assessment methods that I found helpful. Instead of relying on a pre assessment and an assessment at the end of a unit, this chapter offered a “continuum of assessment methods” ranging from an easy understanding of students by “informal checks for understanding” to a more complex understanding required from students through “performance tasks and projects”, and all of these various types of assessments are to be thought of as a collection of evidence.

Lastly, I found it interesting that this chapter not only explains the backward design approach while offering insight on assessment methods, this chapter also explains how a teacher can “organize” what is worthy of understanding. In example, the chapter offers a framework of what the teacher should organize its content into: “worth being familiar with”, “important to know and do”, and “enduring understanding”. The “worth being familiar with” and the “important to know and do” can be viewed as “pre-requisites". The enduring understanding is the “big idea”—it is what the teacher hopes the student will take with them beyond the classroom.

            This chapter gives a unique and helpful insight on organizing instruction. It departs from traditional instruction that I view to be "lecture and test at the end of course" by instead offering a design that appears to be beneficial for student learning and understanding.