UBD Documents, Files, & Links

[Demetri Orlando]

Do you have documents or websites that support Understanding by Design? Please post them here!

[Peter Gow]

I'm posting my owes-much-to-Wiggins giant UbD "Planning Backwards" template here. It also acknowledges some other work we have been doing for a while at our school.

[Marcy Mann]

Thanks to Peter for providing such a thorough document. I look forward to using segments of it to augment the far less thorough one (attached) that I used with teachers of Middle School students this spring.

I've collected these from teachers and am now collating them and trying to make some sense of them for our use in the fall. Can anyone share with me some successful faculty-wide uses? We have a small MS faculty and, beyond noting the occasional (rare?) overlap of skills, concepts, and/or content, I'd like to find some value in the data to share with them. Thanks!

[Peter Gow]

What you have is the rudiments of a curriculum map, and any of the various techniques for drilling down into mapping data could be quite useful. You could post them on a wall somewhere as part of a division meeting and do a "gallery walk" looking for overlaps, repetitions, gaps, missing concepts, or just pass them out and focus on one particular issue (assessment, for example--"how are we assessing reading comprehension?") for a while (as long as a year, really), looking at variety, challenge, evaluation methods and standards, ...

You would generate some great conversations about teaching and learning along the way. Check out just about anything by Heidi Hayes Jacobs on mapping, or look for resources through some of the map purveyors (Rubicon Atlas, The Curriculum Mapper) or even ASCD.

You could also have teachers bring in sample pieces of work from some of the units and then use any of the Looking At Student Work protocols (www.lasw.org) to get some conversation going. The data you are collecting could just be a great start for building a community of reflective practice.

At the very least (and dullest and perhaps least compelling for the teachers) you can use the material to assemble a scope and sequence. I'm not a huge fan of these, because they often become dead documents or prescriptions rather than just snapshots of developing programs. (Who's to say that your curriculum was perfect the day you decided to print up that scope and sequence?, I always want to ask schools that use s&s documents as the absolute basis of "the plan" for years to come.)

Hope this is helpful.

[Marcy Mann]

Yes, indeed, Peter. 'Very helpful. Thanks!