Benefits Of Ubd

It’s no surprise. UbD is a tough concept to grasp. Understanding by Design forces the unit creator to design units backward. It is a completely different concept from what teachers know and learned in their teacher training. While change can be difficult, using UbD as a tool for curriculum design can be both beneficial and time saving for students and teachers alike.
For decades, teachers have been taught the textbook is the curriculum. Course and course work starts at the beginning of textbook and the goal is to get through as much of the textbook as possible by the end of the year. This teaching concept has left students with gaps in their learning and understanding and has forced them onward when skills may have not been mastered yet. And …show more content…
Yes, I believe the standards are important; however, I do not believe they should be the focus. The focus should be on the student and big idea understandings. The standards should be the support to the understandings and that is exactly what UbD does or attempts to do. I saw this in many of the groups during our professional development. They wanted to start out by picking which standards they were going to “cover” instead of asking what big questions they could come up with that incorporated the bigger ideas of each topic/subject. One group was struggling with connecting the standards from one subject to the other. They couldn’t see how their subjects could be integrated. However, once I explained the concept of UbD again using the “Umbrella Method (Essential Question – Unit Question – Content Question), the group members seemed to understand it a little better and started looking at their unit in a bigger picture and essentially came up with a great example of a potential unit with excellent student-centered activities and real-life learnings. Had they continued to strictly focus on the standards, I believe they would not have developed such a potential …show more content…
At first glance, it does look like a lot of extra work. Without proper training, teachers could not only see this as one extra thing to do but could get completely overwhelmed with feeling like they need to redo all of their lessons and units. UbD is something that definitely needs to be introduced slowly with proper training and with full buy-in from all staff members in order to be successful for both the student, teacher, and administration. Additionally, there are parts of the template that I personally do not use. Specifically, the Codes: ATM, are something I do not use. I believe the skills of acquisition, meaning and transfer are already embedded in the other parts of the unit that adding them to the side is redundant. Again, if the teachers are not properly trained on different types of assessment, the ATM section will be pointless to