UbD Discussion

Blog #9 UbD Discussion
UbD (Understanding by Design) is flipping things around. Why start a project without the ending in mind? This is the basis for Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins book. You have to understand what you want your students to know before you can start teaching them. Many times teachers teach and piece together an assessment as an afterthought. This book tries to looking at lesson prep backwards by introducing Backwards Design.

I chose this book for my book review because I am in the Technology Education department and they want the teachers using this design. I have been using this design for 2 classes but we were only required to read the first chapter or so. When I saw the book on the list, I thought I should really learn how I am supposed to be planning. For a quick overview visit this PowerPoint presentation or Grant Wiggin’s website.

The purpose of this blog is to gather pros and cons from discussion boards, book reviews, and reader responses. Sometimes I pick up a book and am immediately intrigued by the information and without looking at both sides, I consider the book the only way to do things. By looking at discussion boards, book reviews, and getting feedback from you who read this, I will get both sides of the story and here the pros and cons which will help me filter the good information from the bad.

I first checked Amazon’s site to get the book reviews. On this site there were 12 reviews, with all of them being positive. The review that stuck out to me was by Christopher Davis. He wrote, “One of my pet peeves is books on applied topics that talk about theory but cannot bridge the theory to application. This handbook does a great job of assisting educators from going from the ideas of backward instructional design to implementing these ideas in actually developing educational plans.” The only improvements listed were that some of the references in the back were not useful and a computer program would make things a lot easier.

Google had all positive except one person reported a fallacy on page 139. The reviewer stated that there is misinformation about Turkey militants. Since he is from Turkey, he claims that the information is totally inaccurate. Goodreads.com has lots of positive reviews with only length and repetition causing concerns.

I was surprised at the lack of negative feedback for this book. Often times if you search reviews for any book there are people that did not like it. From what I have gathered from the book, it does make a lot of sense. I do find it hard to come up with assessments before you know what you are going to teach. I like the importance that it has place on assessment, but I have found that you need to bounce back and forth from instruction to assessment and back again.
Please give me your feedback on this book. Use your experience or just research some reviews.

Philip