UbD Modules A & F

Understanding by Design (UbD) focuses on deep understanding of broad and sweeping concepts to teach as opposed to a traditional emphasis on learning and memorizing facts.  In their Guide to Creating High-Quality Units, Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe present a series of modules for creating instructional units centered in UbD.  In Module A, they list eight key tenets of the process.  Three of them seemed to stick out as fundamental to the ideas expressed in the rest of the reading.  The second tenet states that, “A primary goal of UbD is developing and deepening student understanding – the ability to make meaning of learning via ‘big ideas’ and to transfer learning.”  The fourth tenet lists indicators of understanding, “…revealed when students autonomously make sense of and transfer their learning through authentic performance.”  Tenet five explains that units are best designed in a backwards fashion, working from desired results and planning the best way to attain them.  Those three emphases sum up the ideas and strategies presented in the rest of the module as the authors expound on the practices of UbD.

            The entire process is inquiry driven.  Education and learning should be inquiry driven as the desire to learn is born from the desire to answer questions and understand the unknown.  This is nothing new.  Teachers have been asking their students questions to facilitate learning new material for millennia.  Wiggins and McTighe go to great lengths to assert that “essential” questions lead to more learning and deeper understanding than superficial fact-based questions.  Their points are well-taken.  They provide useful tools and advice for educators who want to ask their students essential questions.  They give examples of essential and nonessential questions side by side so that readers can compare them and see what makes a question essential to deep and long-term understanding.  Whereas nonessential questions are fact-based and can be answered relatively easily, essential questions are open-ended, lead to discussion, debate, more inquiry, and most importantly, transferrable knowledge.  This is because well-written and carefully devised essential questions can be asked again and again.  They are not confined to a narrow topic but instead can be applied to various topics within a subject or perhaps even across subjects. 

            As a future history/social studies teacher, it is easy for me to envision using such a method in my classes.  Many history surveys actually have essential questions laid out in chapter introductions and also at the tops of pages for reference as one reads a particular section.  Many of my instructors use (a lot of) essential questions in their lectures to stimulate discussion and get students thinking deeply about material.  I look at the information presented by Wiggins and McTighe as invaluable in my future career.