Riassunto esame Design of Education Environments, prof. Santi, libro consigliato Understanding by Design - expanded 2nd edition, Wiggins, McTighe

Understanding by design

Introduction

Understanding by Design introduces four vignettes that suggest something about understanding and designing the curriculum and assessments. Each of the four vignettes reveals some worrying aspect of understanding and design. Even 'good' students do not always have a deep understanding of what has been taught, despite the fact that conventional measures (grades) certify success.

The two sins of design

The example of the apples (No. 2) and the example of the world history class (No. 4) suffer from the same general problem, although the dynamics are different. Both cases do not reveal clear intellectual goals. The two versions of the problem can be called the 'twin sins of instructional design' in schools: activity-centered teaching and coverage-centered teaching. Neither provides an adequate answer to the key questions of effective learning (what is important here? What is the purpose? How will this experience, as a learner, enable me to fulfill my obligations?), as there are no explicit ideas guiding the teaching and no plan to ensure learning.

What this book is about

This book is about good design of curriculum, assessment, and instruction, to engage students in exploring big ideas, but it is also an attempt to better understand understanding, especially for assessment purposes. Many students assimilate and remember important concepts but are often unable to understand their meaning.

To understand what understanding is, one has to realize that it has many facets, and one has to identify which ones we are looking for. Understanding is not a single goal (six different aspects of transfer) but a family of interconnected skills. Only through education in understanding would it be possible to develop all of them.

The book, therefore, attempts to answer the many questions that arise in the world of teaching in this way:

• Propose an approach to curriculum and instruction designed to engage students in research, promote transfer of learning, provide a conceptual framework to help students make sense of discrete facts and skills, and discover big ideas in the content.
• Examine a range of methods to adequately assess students' understanding, knowledge, and skills.
• Consider the role that predictable student misunderstandings should play in the design of curricula, assessments, and instruction.
• Explore common curriculum, assessment, and instructional practices that may interfere with cultivating students' understanding and propose a backward design approach to planning that helps us meet standards without sacrificing understanding-related goals.
• Present a theory of six aspects of understanding and explore its theoretical and practical implications for curriculum, assessment, and teaching.
• Present a model unit to assist in designing curricula and assessments that focus on student understanding.
• Show how these individual units should be nested in a broader framework and courses and programs, also framed around the big ideas, essential questions, and assessment tasks.
• Propose a set of design standards to achieve quality control in curricular and assessment projects.
• Advocate that designers should work smarter, not harder, sharing searchable Internet curriculum projects.

The public of the book

The book is aimed at all educators interested in improving student understanding and designing more effective curricula and assessment to achieve this. The audience also includes teachers at all levels, subject and assessment specialists, headmasters, trainers, administrators, etc.

Key terms

• Big idea should be at the heart of education for understanding. It is a concept/theme/issue that gives meaning and connection to facts and skills. For example, adaptation or problem solving prioritizes learning and helps students understand their value in making sense of all the content stuff.
• Curriculum refers to the specific program for learning that is derived from the desired outcomes, i.e., content and performance standards (state-defined or locally developed). It takes the content and shapes it into a plan for how to conduct effective teaching and learning, is a list of topics and inputs, is a map of how to achieve results. The etymology suggests that it is a 'course to follow' given a desired endpoint. It is more than a traditional guide, as it outlines topics, materials, experiences, tasks, and assessments that can be used to achieve the objectives. The best curricula are those written from the point of view of the desired learnings.
• Assessment is the act of determining to what extent the desired results are being achieved and how they are being achieved. It is the main term for the use of many methods of collecting evidence of achievement. Assessment should not be synonymous with evaluation, since the former is more related to learning and the latter is more summative and linked to credentials. Understanding can only be developed through multiple methods of continuous evaluation (with a greater focus on formative/performance assessment).
• Desired results means what has often been defined as intended results/achievements/performance standards. It reminds that the design and performance should be adjusted along the way, if feedback shows that there is a risk of not achieving the desired successes.
• Understanding reveals itself as a complex and confusing objective. It deserves clarification and elaboration (= book challenge). Understanding involves making connections and tying our knowledge together into something that makes sense of things. It implies doing, not only at the mental level. To understand means to be able to use wisdom and effectiveness, to transfer what we know into context, and to apply knowledge and skill effectively. When you understand, you have a fluid and fluent understanding, not rigid and formulaic. Understanding as a noun = special insights (often hard-won). The challenge of teaching is to transform adult understandings into student understandings. If the student gains genuine understanding, then he has really understood. Bloom (1956) argued that the word is too ambiguous to be used as a basis for teaching objectives and their assessment. However, it remains essential to make a distinction between knowing and understanding.

What this book is not about

• Understanding by Design is not a prescriptive program but a more focused and attentive way of thinking about the nature of any project with understanding as its goal. The book does not provide a step-by-step guide but a conceptual framework, a design model, various tools, and methods. Rather, it is a way of designing or redesigning any curriculum that is more likely to yield understanding for students.
• It is not a philosophy of education. The book offers guidance on how to approach any educational design problem related to the goal of student understanding; it helps to better focus design work on how to achieve understanding of 'important ideas'. However, the book should not be seen as competing with other programs or approaches.
• The book presents a robust approach to planning.
• The book focuses mainly on the design of curriculum units, as opposed to individual lessons or broader programs, which do not allow for in-depth development of big ideas, exploration, and authentic application. Lessons that are too short do not allow for complex objectives, while lessons based on unit plans are purposeful and connected.
• Deep understanding is a vital goal of the school, but it is not the only one. There are circumstances where deep and sophisticated understanding is not feasible or desirable, as there is neither the time nor the need to go deep on everything. In some cases, it will be the level of development of the students that will determine the extent to which conceptualization is appropriate.

Some useful warnings and comments

Firstly, even though educators often talk about wanting to go beyond mere coverage and make sure that students really understand, they may find that what they thought was effective teaching for understanding is actually not. They may also find that they are not so clear.

Secondly, despite the fact that many curricula focus adequately on competencies, teacher designers may find that there are big ideas essential for learning key competencies fluently that require more attention in their plans. The challenge is to help students know what to do when decoding the problem alone does not produce meaning. Although many teachers believe that designing for comprehension is incompatible with established content standards and state tests, by the end of the book they will believe this to be false. Most state standards identify/imply big ideas that are meant to be understood and not just covered.

The book also aims to help by proposing potential misunderstandings called 'misunderstanding warnings' in which an attempt is made to anticipate the reader's confusion in the lines of argument. The presence of these warnings sends a message: teaching for understanding and ideas proposed must anticipate potential misunderstandings and difficult points in learning if it is to be effective. Indeed, at the heart of the design approach the book proposes is the need to design lessons and assessments that anticipate, evoke, and overcome students' most likely misconceptions. Teaching for understanding requires the learner to rethink what seemed established or obvious.

Misconception alert!

• Only alternative or progressive methods of teaching and assessment can produce understanding.
• We are against traditional testing.
• We are against letter grades.

The challenge is not to choose one tactic over another, but to expand and better target the teaching repertoire, based on a more careful consideration of what the learning objectives imply.

Chapter 1: Backward design

Planning, v. to have aims and intentions; to plan and execute (Oxford Dictionary)

The complexities of design work are often underestimated. Many people think they know a lot about design. What they don't realize is how much more they need to know to do design well, with distinction, refinement, and grace (John McClean).

Teachers are designers, but they are also designers of assessments to diagnose students' needs to guide teaching and to allow teachers, students, and others (parents and administrators) to determine whether objectives have been achieved. As in other professions dealing with design, education designers have to take into account their audience, since the effectiveness of projects corresponds to the achievement of objectives for specific end users (or clients; in this case, students).

As in all design professions, standards inform and shape our work. Indeed, teachers cannot teach any subject by any means but instead are guided by national/state/district or institutional standards that specify what students should know. These standards allow the identification of teaching and learning priorities.

However, external standards, in particular the needs of the many different students, must also be taken into account when designing (interests, development levels, classes, etc.).

Good design, therefore, is not so much about acquiring some new technical skills as it is about learning to be more reflective and specific about purpose and what it involves.

Because backwards is better

Purposeful instructional design requires teachers and curriculum writers to make a major shift in the way they think about the nature of their work. Although considerations of what to teach and how to teach it may dominate thinking first out of habit, the challenge is to focus first on the desired learning from which appropriate teaching will logically follow. In short, the best designs flow backwards from the desired learning. The appropriateness of this approach becomes clearer when one considers the educational goal: understanding. Only after specifying the desired outcomes can we focus on the content, methods, and activities that are most likely to achieve those outcomes.

Instead, many teachers remain tied to traditional activities (input - teaching) instead of focusing on desired outcomes (output - learning). See example on page 15 (understanding the book) approach for "hope" with too vague a goal. It involves throwing some content and activities against the wall and hoping that some will stick. The essence of design comprehension lies in answering the "why?" and "so what?" questions posed by students.

The two sins of traditional design

Weak design implies two kinds of aimlessness: the 'twin sins' of traditional design. The error of activity-oriented design could be called "hands-on without being minds-on", engaging experiences that only accidentally lead to understanding, thus leading nowhere intellectually. A second form of aimlessness goes by the name of 'coverage', an approach in which students march through the textbook, page by page, in a valiant attempt to get through all the factual material within a prescribed time. In general, the focus on activity is more typical in elementary and junior high school, while coverage is prevalent in high school and university.

Misconception alert! Coverage does not translate to understanding.