There was a lot that was talked about in these chapters that was very interesting to read. I really liked the metaphor of the teacher as an architect that has to design something while still adhering to certain standards and being mindful of their audience. I agree that teaching is like designing. You have to design lesson plans, units, goals, objectives, and so on while still being mindful of your students’ needs and your school’s standards. Teaching by the book may hit all of the schools’ standards, but it may not engage students nor cater to them as individualized learners, thus, design is one of the most important parts of a teacher’s job in order to create an engaged and successful learning environment.
I found the idea of using a backwards teaching design to be very helpful. The text informs the reader that the goals and objectives should be thought of first before the tactics, techniques, and lesson plan is created. In other words, one should know where he wants his student to be at the end of the unit before he even begins to create the lesson plan. This idea is proposed to show that teachers need to have a clear goal in mind for their students to reach and that their lessons should be based on reaching these goals. Too often is it that teachers pick an idea they want to teach and a book that goes well with this idea, but they never think about what exactly they want their students to take away from this lesson/idea and why they will benefit from it. Working backwards will make the goals much more clear and, thus, the lesson can be created to fit these goals rather than being created because they are interesting but have no clearly set goal(s). In my opinion this method of design makes much more sense than the common practice.
I also found figure 1.2 to be very helpful towards my future career. It was a diagram that provided a way for teachers to decipher their priorities in their classes in order to help with the first step of backwards designing. I could definitely see myself using this diagram to guide myself in the right direction when trying to discover what I want my students to learn and what I want them to be able do and understand. In this way I can help my students reach higher levels of thinking like analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. I also found the 4 filters to be helpful for my future as a teacher. It provided me with multiple questions to ask myself when trying to decide what is most important for my students to learn. Again, these are guidelines and materials I can use in the future to guide myself to becoming a better teacher.
In Module A, there were many things that I found useful and interesting, but I specifically liked the bullet points that summarized “the key findings that provide a conceptual base for UbD’s specific instruction and assessment practice”. In these bullet points the text emphasizes developing understanding of big ideas and key concepts. Thus, as teachers, we need to provide our students with models and schemas and other means of teaching in order to help them not merely memorize information, but to understand the information.
When reading this I related it to an exercise that a health teacher had the class perform in 10th grade. We were learning about different mental disorders and their affects on those who have them. I can still remember one activity we did in order to learn about schizophrenia. The teacher broke the class into two groups: students putting puzzles together and students that were not. The students that were not were taken out into the hallway. The teacher told us secretly that we had to pretend to be helping the students put together their puzzles while secretly actually trying to mess them up by moving pieces or coaching them in the wrong direction. The students putting the puzzles together, however, thought that the hallway students were there to help guide them. The goal was to be the person to finish the puzzle first for a prize. What happened was every time a puzzler would almost finish the puzzle we would mess them up. The puzzle was supposed to be a picture of the food pyramid. When the puzzlers caught on to what the other students were doing, they started getting mad and telling the teacher. When the teacher came over he said “But that person hasn’t been doing anything to you. I’ve been watching them and they have been helping you the entire time”. He did this to every student that complained until students began to get mad and give up. Other students, while putting their puzzles together, actually started realizing that their puzzles were not of food pyramids at all but, instead, they were of random things like STDs and viruses. When they told the teacher they had the wrong puzzle, the teacher insisted that the puzzle they were putting together was of the food pyramid (even though they weren’t). In the end, nobody finished their puzzles and everyone gave up. He then asked what happened and proceeded to tell us that schizophrenic people tend to feel these experiences often: hallucinations, misperception, etc. While the world around may appear normal to others, schizophrenic people tend to see things that aren’t real. Thus, while the common misconception is that schizophrenics are “crazy”, they are not crazy, but, rather, they are experiencing an entirely different world than those who are not schizophrenic.
In this way students were not simply expected to memorize symptoms of schizophrenia, but they performed an exercise that made them better understand the big idea and key concepts of the lesson. They felt what it was like to be in the perspective of a schizophrenic person, which is something that will stick in the head of the student a lot longer than simply memorizing facts. It definitely worked for me! This is the kind of teacher I want to be, and it is the type of teaching that this module is encouraging: Meaningful teaching.
Module F was also another section that not only was very interesting and useful, but it too reminded me of a previous course I took: SED406 with professor Kraus. The module talks about essential questions in language arts and how they must be driven at identifying the main topics for one to concentrate on. In other words, it is the big picture idea or question that needs answering. We learned about these questions in SED406, and I like to think that I understand the concept. While this is true, this section of the text identified some essential questions for all contents, and I found many of these essential questions to be useful in the future. I realized that I could steal some of these essential questions in my own classrooms in order to get towards what I want my students to understand after leaving my class. Again, it is another material that acts as a stepping stone towards backwards design. Once one identifies the essential question, he then can move on to plan how one will get the students to be able to answer these essential questions.
I also enjoyed the section about purpose overriding format when writing essential questions. I completely agree with this concept. The purpose of a question and what students are learning is always more important how the question is formatted. A teacher must always be able to identify the “why” of a question they are posing before he identifies the “how”. While this is true for posing questions, I do not necessarily believe that this is true for creating a lesson for students. I believe that in creating a lesson plan, both the purpose and the format are equally important. It is important for the lesson to have a purpose for being taught, but it is also important that the teacher formats the lesson in a way that the purpose can be executed well and be impressed upon the student. If the format is not well thought out, the purpose of the lesson can be lost. Thus, while I do agree that this may be true in writing essential questions, it may not be a good mantra when creating lesson plans.
Overall I found the text very thought provoking and enjoyed it a great deal.
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