Chapter 12. The Big Picture: UbD as Curriculum Framework

First, the authors talk about good questions and their importance to develop interesting and fruitful connections and meanings. They also state that content and instructional methods even when they are of the best quality could fail in achieving effecting learning.
I have to say that I totally agree with what they say, since in many cases teachers are more worried about teaching the most amount of contents they can and leave aside the learner’s process itself, assessments and understanding.
According to what we read, “The aim of learner’s understanding is at risk in course and curriculum sequences that involve one tour of each topic, in a flow dictated by the separate content element as opposed to learner performance goals related to understanding” (Wiggins & Mc Tighe, p.291) The goal in all areas of study should be understand the subject and acquire skills and knowledge by doing and relating what they are learning to different subjects, their experiences, context, among others.
The content our students learn should be used by dealing with diverse and complicated ideas and also with different aspects of performance.
Authors propose that the curriculum sequence found in the more “modern” performance areas is truer to what we know about how and why people learn and should be applied to all traditional academic areas if what we want is to improve learners’ understanding.
Finally, it is quite important that we as teachers be able to sequence and organize our students’ performance and learning process, in this way, we will help them to learn in a more effective manner.

Chapter 9: Planning for learning

We have agreed on the importance of thinking about our students when planning. It is not only contents, skills, and new concepts but also the tools our students need to develop when learning a foreign language. It is essential to think about what students need to learn and not what we want them to learn. Our planning should be engaging and user-friendly, so in this way our students will feel at ease and will be able to follow the lessons in a proper manner.
We cannot forget that that the essence of backward design is asking the following: What kind of instructional approaches, resources and experiences are required to achieve the goals of the desired results we have set?, what are our students’ needs? We are supposed to focus more in learning that in teaching as such.
The author states that a good plan should have two main characteristics; it should be engaging and effective. When we talk about engaging planning, we mean that the design should be provoking, energizing and fascinating for all the students, not for some of them. This is not only related to academic content but also to intellectually compelling and meaningful. It is essential that students enjoy what they do but at the same time centered on big ideas and challenging.
Effective design helps students become more competent and worthy at worthy work, in this way they will go beyond the usual expectations. “The design pays off in substantive, value-added learning…”. In this way students will achieve something of intellectual substance and they will know about it.

Chapter 6: Crafting Understanding

Wiggins (2005) states that there is a difference between understanding and factual knowledge, he mentions that understanding makes a claim using facts and that facts are data. The understanding build up its theory based on interpretations. Dewey (1933) affirmed that a fact requires apprehension, while an understanding requires comprehension. We can see that getting understanding is not easy; in order to achieve this understanding we should help our students asking questions about the facts, connecting them to other facts and try to apply this to different situations and even to their own experiences. Understanding is not given; understanding is the end of a process, a conclusion made using the facts.
Students tend to think in a very concrete way, sometimes they do not go beyond what they are reading or even listening and tend to give concrete answers most of the time repeating the same thing they were exposed to. This is why we should work more on developing a critical thinking again, it is very important for students to make connections, to take into account different possibilities, test diverse theories and to infer.
As teachers we have to be careful since sometimes we tend to ask the wrong questions which at the same time will lead our students in the wrong direction. The author proposes to state understanding as a proposition because in this way students will be able to make inferences on the conclusions we have set.

Chapter 5 Essential Questions: Doorways to Understanding

According to what we have read, there are fundamental aspects to consider when designing a lesson plan; we have mentioned objectives, strategies, priorities and no it's time to talk about essential questions in order to promote our students understanding. As the author states, essential questions lead to more questions and at the same time they lead to deeper understanding.
Questions shouldn't be so global, best questions are the ones which engage students, the ones students consider relevant and the ones that promote connections and give the curriculum a coherence and consistency. Many times we ask the typical questions that do not promote a deeper thinking or a deeper comprehension.
After reading this chapter, I realize that if we use the correct questions and think more about we really want to get from our students, we will be able to promote critical thinking and a real comprehension not only related to reading skills but to all the skills.
This chapter is also very interesting since it provides us with some tips that will help when generating essential questions and one of the most important things is to make questions that we really want our students to answer, problems to solve or to investigate about.
Finally I would like to say that if we start working with this type of questions in our own classrooms, we will help our students develop more vocabulary, more self confidence and a more holistic view about the world. We must not forget how important it is to help students have clear goals and understand the material they are working with. Having a purpose is fundamental and develop a critical thinking will be useful not only during school years but also when working or facing different situations in life.

Chapter 3: Gaining clarity on our goals

This chapter reminds us that objectives and stating clear desired results are fundamental when planning our lessons, due to the fact that are many aims that that have an important role when teaching, in this case a foreign language. Of course we are not going to have just one goal, but many; the important thing is to know how to set clear objectives, to have priorities and make choices on what are we going to teach and how are we going to do it.
One of our responsibilities as teachers is to be creative and flexible. We need in some cases to adapt our lessons to our own students’ needs and learning styles. Of course this is not easy, sometimes we have many hours teaching per week and we do not have enough time to plan in a proper way, and we don’t have the time to think about every single student we have. Sometimes a lesson seems to be very good, it looks like students are learning and that at the same time they are enjoying what they are learning, but we do not have clear priorities so at the end we stop and think: “yes, this is what I wanted them to get from the class”.
After being teaching for a while, I can say that I’m able to think and plan beforehand what goals my students are supposed to achieve and what is the best way for them to do it.
It is essential to think about the contents, sometimes there is an impressive amount of things we want to teach, but it is fundamental to set priorities and make choices around assessments, assignments, tasks and teaching strategies. The best teacher is not the one who teaches lots of contents but the one who thinks about their students’ needs and who cares for their learning.
In order to set clear priorities it could be very useful to think about what is worth being familiar with, what is important to know and do and what are the big ideas and core tasks. Once we have set clear goals and priorities, our teaching will be more engaging and will cause and impact on our student, which is in many cases, what we want to achieve at the end.

Understanding by design, Chapter I

Teaching is not only what you do inside the classroom, but also what you do before and after interacting with the students.
Teaching always has a purpose; that is why it is fundamental to set clear learning objectives that will help us and of course will help students to see the light at the end of the tunnel.
We know that we are dealing with a specific context in the place we teach, but even there; inside the classroom we are dealing with many different realities and learning styles. Therefore, setting objectives has to be a thoughtful and committed work in which we have to consider national and institutional standards, students’ previous experiences towards learning, and of course the desired results.
According to what I’ve seen, many times lessons are prepared and shaped from the book and activities, losing sometimes the focus on the expected outcomes we are pursuing. As we have been talking week after week, in some cases the book becomes the Bible and we tend to follow it leaving objectives aside. Therefore the use of backward design will help us to keep working on results sought and students’ meaningful learning. As it is stated in the chapter, only after having specified the desired results, we can focus on the content, methods and activities that will contribute to achieve those goals.

Wiggins gives us the framework for backward design, which consists of three stages:
Stage 1: Identify desired results:
What should students know, understand and be able to do?
What content is worthy of understanding?

Stage 2: Determine acceptable evidence
To define what forms of assessment will demonstrate that the student acquired the knowledge, understanding, and skill to answer the questions.

Stage 3: Plan learning experiences and instruction
Teaching strategies and learning experiences that help students to develop and demonstrate what they are supposed to understand.

There is no doubt that for our reality this is a challenge, since it seems that planning has been made the other way around, but I am sure this is a great method of designing a course and it will be very useful in order to help us focusing on our students’ meaningful learning rather than just paying attention to teaching.