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When so clearly laid out, as it is in the UbD model, the
idea that a curriculum is a means to an end – and therefore the design of a
curriculum should begin with identifying what that end is – does seem like
common sense. Yet, as the authors point out, this is not the typical approach
to education – most teachers take an approach that focuses on superficial
coverage of lots of content as specified by standards or outlined in textbooks.
When I look at the content standards for science, I can understand how this
might happen – the amount of content to cover feels overwhelming, I can see how
it would be easy to focus on covering it all without stopping to prioritize or
think about what is really important for the students to learn. I like this
idea of prioritizing content – of identifying and teaching to the enduring and
transferable ideas, the linchpin ideas – but I wonder how much freedom I will
have as a teacher to do such prioritization. Will I not be accountable for
delivering all of the content standards? Regardless of the answer to that
question, I think the UbD model offers some excellent guiding questions to help
teachers turn content standards into big ideas or understandings: Here is
the content I have to deliver – what would use of this content look like? Here
are the facts my students must learn, but what do they mean? What kind of
changes do I want to see in my students as a result of this instruction? What
are the best ways to guide and assess those changes?
I also find it helpful to think about essential questions as
questions that foster ongoing inquiry – the goal is not necessarily to answer
the essential questions, but to keep them alive. As the authors write, “Serious
learning always involves inquiry in the face of uncertainty.” I love this idea
of presenting students with uncertainty (as opposed to certainties that they
must memorize and regurgitate) and teaching them the skills and strategies they
need to be comfortable with uncertainty, to let it guide their learning
experience instead of shutting it down. Unfortunately, I think that many
students have become so used to just being given the answers that uncertainty terrifies
them and turns them off from the learning process. I love the quote from a
teacher that the authors share, that we want our students “to know what to do
when they don’t know what to do.” This gets at what the authors are saying when
they say that transfer of learning is a primary goal of education – I think
this is an important tenet for teachers to keep in mind. It shapes the design
of instruction in that it demands authentic learning experiences that present
students with genuine problems that “shift a student from the role of a passive
knowledge receiver into a more active role as a constructor of meaning.”
What I find interesting about this inquiry approach is that
it frames understandings (or big ideas) as inferences that students are guided
towards, even if the statement of the understanding sounds like a fact. This
relates to what the authors say about the purpose of an essential question
being more important than its format. Just because the big idea sounds like a
fact, just because the essential question may appear to have a simple answer,
this doesn’t mean that instruction should be simple delivery of that fact –
that is lazy teaching. A teacher’s role is to frame essential questions and
understandings within learning experiences that help students come to their own
understanding – only in this way will the knowledge be enduring and
transferable. And this idea extends to assessment as well – as this UbD tenet
states, “Understanding is revealed when students autonomously make sense of and
transfer their learning through authentic performance.”
This idea that understandings appear to teachers (content
experts) as facts but can be framed for learners as inquiry got me thinking
back to Wilhelm and Vygotsky. As the UbD authors point out, understandings
eventually become facts – as content experts, we take it for granted that the
knowledge we have is the result of a process we once went through. What just
seem like facts to us now are actually the product of active knowledge construction.
To be better teachers, we need to take a step back and acknowledge this process
– as Wilhelm does with literacy. We need to provide our students with essential
questions that begin as teacher prompts but eventually become internalized as
self-prompts. In this way, essential questions are scaffolding, supporting
students as they work through the zones of development.
Reading through UbD, Module A, and Module F, I also had flashbacks to the Microteaching Lessons in SED 406. More specifically I had heavy recollections to our Indirect Teaching Lessons. What I saw in our reading were the attempts that the writer made to convince us that as profession educators our job is, and always will be, to make the student question for themselves. Even in the form of the "Backwards Teaching" style, we literally have give them the prompt and the question to answer. From there we have them work backwards to see how what we give them in class reaches that destination.
ReplyDeleteSounds all too familiar to me.
But of course the destination is the journey to discovery itself. We repetitively present certain questions to our students(the Essential Questions) to instill them with the curiosity until, like you said, it "becomes internalized as self-prompts." And I do agree with you that students have become too used to simply being given the answer. For those few that choose to pursue Higher Education, it is there that they learn the answer to academic problems isn't so dry-and-cut.