January 20th to 22nd 2015 (Organised by ASCD in Singapore)
Understanding by Design Workshop
January 20th to 21st 2015
Understanding by Design Leadership Workshop
January 22nd 2015
Organisedby ASCD in Singapore
The Principal and Curriculum and eLearning leader, along with three teachers from the Science and Humanities departments, attended the teacher workshop. One teacher left on the 21st so four staff attended the leadership workshop, followed by a visit to Hwa Chong International School on 23rd and meeting with Teamie leaders on 22nd.
The aim of the teacher workshop was to show teachers how to apply the principles of Understanding by Design when planning units of work. The Science and Humanities teachers prepared for the conference by agreeing with their panel members the units of work to be re-written using the UbD approach. Each subject panel also agreed to implement the revised units work, by the start of the Summer term. The new UbD based units would then be evaluated, before extending the use of UbDapproach to other units of work in the Junior Curriculum.
Science and Humanities teachers were selected because both panels were committed to reforming curriculum to make their units of work more students centred, and more concept based. The Science team are moving away from their dependency on text books for course design, and the Humanities team want to develop a more collective and productive approach towards the planning units of work.
The UbD approach is well established and widely used by schools in the region and in the US. It offers teachers a proven template for designing courses where learning is about developing deep understandings by asking key questions. This is often not the case for busy teachers and Cheryl Fung described the problem in this way:
‘Mr. McTighe pointed out two common ‘SINs’ of teachers when designing lessons, (i) we either overwhelm students with too much content in a lesson ….. or (ii) we arrange too many activities in a lesson that only keep students occupied’
She then went on to observe the frustrations experienced by her LTPSS colleagues:
Many of us prepare a lot before classes, we spend a lot of time in planning activities for lessons, hoping our students will get the most out of them. However, very often, the responses were some puzzled faces, dozed off souls and poor performance in assessments. Such outcome is frustrating.
Kevin makes the same observation about his own teaching practice.
The main problem is teacher cannot really get a good picture over the progress of our students, as they are don’t really have any response and the assessment are not formative enough. From this conference, it’s really a good time for me to reflect over the effectiveness of my teaching and learning of students.
Hilary Chan commented how the philosophy behind UbD is much more appropriate for learning in the 21st century and for our students at LTPSS:
Understanding by Design by Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins is an important philosophy for teachers that want to build classrooms for 21st century learning. Teaching and learning is about “understanding’ …. the need to shift our pedagogical ideology away from more traditional schemes of learning …. Understanding by Design also gives us a greater coherence in curriculum design so that the continuum is clearer for different departments, parents and students.
At LTPSS many of us will acknowledge that our planning is often fragmentary, rushed and tends to focus on separate topics rather than on the Big Ideas and Key Questions we want students to reflect on in a unit of work
Cheryl describes this as:
The Understanding by Design (UBD) conference provided a practical and scaffolded template to build a lesson /curriculum that rhymes with good learning ….. It makes learning a more ‘down to earth’ process for students through a well-structured framework.
This view is echoed by Hilary when she says:
Previously, I wasmerely going into class and covering the curriculum. But now, I am trying to go into class bearing in mind the “Big Ideas” …..We, as teachers, are not just responsible for providing good learning to students, but also have to seeourselves as designers who shape engaging and meaningful learning experiences ….And that echoes with one of my favorite quotes in Jay Mctighe’s journal, ‘Teachers are designers. An essential act of our profession is the crafting of curriculum and learning experiences to meet specified purposes
Kevin makes a similar comment and also sees the connection between UbD and FIP:
….I learnt how to design and plan my lesson by using the backward design, which can let us think of our learning targets more clearly and help us to decide what the right thing for our students to learn is. Moreover, I have learnt how to set up some essential questions which can facilitate our students to learn. Many teachers don’t know the needs of our students, they may think students can learn, but finally they don’t.
UbD also fits in well with LTPSS commitment to the 7 Habits because aUbD course starts with the ‘End in Mind’ by identifying at the beginning the desired results, followed by the Acceptable Evidence we expect students to produce. Only then do we plan the learning activities. All too often teachers design courses around learning activities and then try to retro fit the assessment, which may not assess what we the students have learnt.
Courses planned using UbDwill be much more suited to the pedagogy and learning design we have been promoting through FIP. UbD requires teachers to plan around Learning Targets and useAfL, as well as evidence what students have learnt. Both templates are founded on the same principles about how to plan for learning rather than just plan for what we are going to teach.
In Science we will be using UbD to re-write the Acids and Alkali and Energy units of work and in Humanities it will be to re-write the Quality of Life unit of work. As Cheryl sums it up when she describes her next steps:
The trip is undoubtedly an eye-opening experience. I am going to apply the UBD concept in rewriting the third module of the S3 Humanities curriculum, which is on quality of life. I believe that the newly learned skills will help creating an appropriate atmosphere for our students to learn step by step and relate their learning with the bigger ideas that connect different subjects.
The Leadership workshop was an opportunity for us to reflect on how we can use the principles of UbD to plan the whole curriculum and make stronger connections between courses in different subject areas. At the conference we were able to develop a concept map, or blueprint, which makes explicit the relationship between pedagogy (FIP), assessment (AfL), and curriculum development (UbD). It also confirmed the appropriateness of our new survey questions for evaluating the quality of students’ learning experience, based on the Tripod Project at Harvard University. When we visited Hwa Chong we were able to do some sharing about how we evaluate students’ learning as well as see how they were designing their new learning environments.
The adoption of UbDrepresents the last piece of the jigsaw which completes the learning landscape of LTPSS. A landscape built around the connections between our initiatives on pedagogy, professional practice, AfL, student learning, eLearningetc