week 2 A3

Understanding by design is a Planning frame for teaching. Grant Wiggins explains ‘we as teachers want to make it more likely “by design” that when we teach, we will be more focused on our goals and then we can ensure that are lessons are effective.’ Understanding by design helps teachers plan for efficacy; however, it doesn’t train the teacher how to be a good teacher, just how to plan right. For us to become good teachers, other ways/ books may help. Understanding by design is before we enter the classroom, it helps us keep in mind our larger goals and how we should use our shorter goals to get there. Once a teacher knows where they want to end up at the end of the year, they can plan, assess and act accordingly. For example, if a student makes a comment the teacher can take that comment to help her lead the class to the next topic.

We sometimes see a miss alignment in short term and long-term goals, for example, if the long-term goal is to get our students to be creative thinkers, then we need our short-term goals to focus on critical and creative thinking. One of our goals should be to have our students be able to perform, the right way, effectively on their own. Planning our lessons should include tasks that will help with that. What Grant Wiggins is saying, is that we should take our long-term goals and imbed them into our short-term goals and everyday lessons. Just like aby a soccer game, if the coach tells his students exactly what to do and each move, they should make, the soccer players will never be able to play a game by themselves, they will always need to be guided. So too, we as teachers should empower our students to be able to identify a task and what needs to be done, without us telling them exactly what they should do.

Teachers should not base their lessons off of textbooks, rather a teacher should use the textbook as a resource to help her prepare. The problem with textbooks is, that the textbook doesn’t know the teacher’s transfer goals. Text books goals are the content, and a teacher’s goal shouldn’t be the content, rather what meanings and transfer do they want their students to be able to do at the end of the lesson and they use the content to get there. When we are designing our lessons, we should design based on the outcome of what we want our students to be able to do, not based off the content.

When teachers start their lesson, they want to make sure that they engage all students! For example, before starting a math lesson about mean, median and mode a teacher can throw out this interesting question “how do you know if something is fair?” After the class discusses what’s considered fair/ not, the teacher will say “hey do you think math can help us figure out if something is fair?” This helps get your students into the lesson and teaching them what to do if they come to a situation. After the class does lots of different works about fairness, on day three the class opens their textbooks and learns math. If math is taught like this, it will become exciting for the students to learn and they will understand how to use it in their lives.

We as teachers have an obligation to expand the interest level of our students and intellectually engage them into our lessons. We should try to make examples that interest them. Just like game producers make sure that every step of the game is interesting so that you end up buying it so too we should make every part of my lesson like that. We have to incentivize every Lesson, every unit, every activity, every day and every course.