Reddit Reddit reviews Understanding by Design, Expanded 2nd Edition(Package May Vary)

We found 7 Reddit comments about Understanding by Design, Expanded 2nd Edition(Package May Vary). Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

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7 Reddit comments about Understanding by Design, Expanded 2nd Edition(Package May Vary):

u/elizinthemorning · 16 pointsr/teaching

I also use a "backwards design" method. My process has been really influenced by Understanding by Design by Wiggins & McTighe. I really recommend that book, but here are the key points that I keep in mind:

  • The thing that comes first is figuring out the essential questions for the unit. These are the questions that students will seek to answer as they study. They may not be questions with "right" and "wrong" answers, and they are definitely not questions that can be answered briefly. For example, a unit about Egypt might involve the question "How does geography affect the way people live?" or one about electricity might include "What influences how brightly a bulb shines?"

  • Next step is to identify what understandings the students should have at the end of the unit, such as "Students will know Ohm's Law (voltage = current * resistance)" or "Students will understand how the ancient Egyptians depended on the Nile River for food and that the presence of the river allowed a large civilization to develop."

  • Next develop assessments, considering what will prove that students have gained the understandings above. Perhaps the student has to build several kinds of circuits and explain aloud why the bulbs in the different circuits appear more or less bright. Maybe the student writes a short story from the point of view of an Egyptian farmer thinking about why the river matters.

  • Then, as with your method, the activities come last, again thinking about the previous step - what will give students the experiences and knowledge they need to gain those understandings so they can express them in the assessment later? This keeps units from being a collection of fun but only somewhat-related activities.

    That was kind of a long explanation, but it's kind of an involved process! It works really well for me, though - it keeps me tied in to the "big picture" of my goals for the kids' learning even as I plan the day-to-day experiences. Hope it helps!
u/eraserh · 6 pointsr/ELATeachers

Plan backwards. For each unit figure out your final, summative assessment, determine how long you want the unit to be, and then plan lessons with objectives that focus in on whatever skills or content knowledge you plan on assessing in the final project.

It's worth investing in a copy of Understanding by Design to help you plan your units, especially if you haven't studied teaching in undergrad or grad school.

u/heymister · 3 pointsr/AskReddit

I'm gonna forego all the other threads about good books and best books because, on reddit, the list always seems to be the same. Not knocking it, as I've contributed to it, and because I agree with most of the choices I find each time. But I'm going to list a few books I read in the past ten years of so that don't fit the reddit norm, and because they struck a chord with me.

  1. Trout Fishing in America -- Richard Brautigan.

    A great drunk writer.

  2. At Home with Jamie -- Jamie Oliver.

    I've been working to cook from scratch, and this book has helped me understand the beauty and satisfaction to be had in working all day to create one meal.

  3. Understanding by Design -- Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe

    As a teacher, this has been instrumental to my work. Learning how we learn and learning how to teach others to learn is succinctly broken down into necessary parts.

  4. World War Z -- Max Brooks

    By far the best book I've read in ten years.

  5. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time -- Mark Haddon

    Just plain, good storytelling, and with a narrator who'll question your capacity to understand other narrators.
u/Short_Swordsman · 2 pointsr/teaching
u/translostation · 1 pointr/latin

> This particular departmental person likes to micromanage (or appear to be doing so)

This is basically the exact opposite of how good teaching happens. You can't micro-manage it because everyone teaches differently. You have to let people be themselves in the classroom or they won't be at all - except for being insincere and unmotivating. Students (at all levels) learn more from teachers who are passionate about what and how they're doing things. Taking that away is a great way to ensure that your students hate the class and become disinterested.

>It seems (we've only had one meeting thus far) to be a "share experiences" type of meeting

This is actually useful. Many of my best learning experiences in terms of growing as a teacher have come from sharing what I'm doing with colleagues and reflecting on it. If managed correctly, it can be a hugely beneficial process. If managed incorrectly (as it sounds like here) it can become a great process for saying "No, you didn't do it the way I told you. You're wrong. Do it again my way."

>I mean, the only thing that really qualifies me to teach these kids is that I know some shit, I've read some shit, and I was enthusiastic enough to get her support for it.

I mean, that's basically what qualifies most of us to teach most of the time. Even the "traditional" teachers are in this boat - it's all theory until you step inside a classroom and try to make the pieces fit together in a way that works for you. No worries. You'll get it down eventually. Good teaching is really hard to do. Anyone who tells you otherwise isn't a good teacher.

>mostly because our numbers are a bit sad. I think the department had more Greek 101s this semester than Latin 101s.

This sounds like the department needs to look at who is in charge of teaching the Latin sections (both prof. and TAs) and how that's happening. This is an absurd statistic that I've never heard of anywhere before and must in some way reflect how the course is being managed on an admin. level.

>It's a bit patronizing, really. Especially at the university level. These are full grown adults. But we still need to use stickers and read "The Night Before Christmas" to them in Latin in order for them to stay with it? I think not.


The sad thing is that these attempts to "make it relevant" ARE patronizing and DO drive students away. No one wants to be treated like a child (as an adult). I bet that's part of the enrollment issue.

>every TA gets a 2 day training session before they're considered "ready" to teach. Two days.

This is absurd. Anyone who think that's enough time to train someone to teach is out of their skull. I spend more time training my volunteers to teach in a leadership program I help manage. There's no way that should be an acceptable program for a University.

>TA quality can be really abysmal. If you have a person droning on, reading off a PowerPoint for 50 minutes four days a week, you will have complaints regardless of the topic. And hence, shit TAs lead to massive over-corrected oversight. That's just what I surmise through deduction, however.

This is so true. And the sad thing is that many of those TAs go on to be professors that teach that way. As a policy I used to skip classes like that in Uni. because I could accomplish twice as much in half the time at home and still get the "A". That anyone could "teach" that way and call it anything close to "effective" is a farce.

A friendly suggestion to you: here are the four most useful texts I've encountered in terms of teaching. I know that not all of them are written for the university level, but they all provide unique insight into parts of the process. If you can get your hands on them, I really suggest you spend some time reading them. Not because I think you're one of those shit TAs, but because it really seems like you don't want to be one and I doubt that your Uni. is going to offer much support in the way of helping you not do that.

  1. The First Days of School by Harry Wong. This is hands-down the best down-and-dirty guide I've encountered to basic teaching. Honestly, I don't think it will make anyone a great teacher, but it most definitely will make anyone that goes into the classroom and understands this book a competent teacher. I recommend it here especially for the thoughts about procedure and classroom management - two things that most Uni. people don't think they need to worry about, but two of the biggest areas that impact what you can accomplish in a given time period.

  2. Why Don't Students Like School by Daniel Willingham. This is basically a high-level summary of what we know about brain science and learning written by one of the world's experts on Cog. Sci. and Ed. Totally useful for understanding the mechanical process that is "learning" and how to manage it more effectively based on what we know about it thus far.

  3. Teacher's Handbook: Contextualized Language Instruction by Shrum and Glisan. This is the ACTFL-recommended basic text for foreign language pedagogy. It'll bring you up-to-date in terms of research and best-practices on a variety of different L2 teaching levels. You'll also come to realize how fucked our current pedagogy model is for Latin & Greek.

  4. Understanding by Design by Wiggins and McTighe. UbD is technically a curricular framework for thinking about how we plan our courses, but it also applies to the micro-level in terms of how we plan our lessons. The big idea: start with a list of mastery concepts that students need to demonstrate competency in and work backwards. The book is totally worth it as a thinking-tool for how you go about planning and executing your lessons.

    Bonus Teach the Latin, I Pray You by Paul Distler. Distler offers an alternative to the current Latin L2 pedagogy we use. I'm not 100% on board with D.'s methods, but in terms of how we go about things currently vs. what you'll find in Shrum & Glisan, he's WAY closer.
u/Exponential · 1 pointr/teaching
u/eletzi · 1 pointr/teaching

A common mistake and misperception about teaching is the focus that new teachers (and sometimes whole districts) place on daily planning. What I mean to say is that rather than focusing your energy on what's on for the next sixty minutes, your plan should have a larger goal and direction. When I taught in NYC, district rules required that I was able to produce a plan for what I was doing at that very moment, but never that I had a detailed idea of where the class was heading. The most effective teachers have a unit plan, and often design those plans backwards from the goals they wish the class to achieve.

Check out Understanding by Design, a really powerful system of resources and thinking about curriculum design that's also something that keeps coming up in the ed community.

Lots of this material will be discussed during your education coursework, but if you try examining some of this now, you'll be miles ahead of others in your classes.

edit: another resource I find amazingly useful is Bridging English, a textbook I bought for a methods class during my masters degree. I'm still constantly turning back to it and its incredible appendices. I now work in New Zealand, and nobody on this side of the world seems to have heard of it, but my colleagues have all had a look and love it.