Essential questions and understanding by design

1. ESSENTIAL QUESTIONS
UNDERSTANDING BY DESIGN
COMMON CORE STANDARDS

2. Remembering
Understanding
Applying
Analyzing
Evaluating
Creating
• Creating – designing, constructing, planning,
producing, inventing, devising, making
• Evaluating – checking, hypothesizing, critiquing,
experimenting, judging, testing, detecting,
monitoring
• Analyzing – comparing, organizing,
deconstructing, attributing, outlining, finding,
structuring, integrating
• Applying – implementing, carrying out, using,
executing
• Understanding – interpreting, summarizing,
inferring, paraphrasing, classifying, comparing,
explaining, exemplifying
• Remembering – recognizing, listing, describing,
identifying, retrieving, naming, locating, finding
Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy

3. Image Source
Higher Order Thinking (HOTs)

4. Essential Questions at the top of Bloom’s
Taxonomy
 Create - innovate
 Evaluate – make a thoughtful choice between
options, with the choice based on a clearly stated
criteria
 Synthesize – invent a new or different version
 Analyze – develop a thorough and complex
understanding through skillful questioning.
Framing Essential Questions

5. Essential Questions (EQs)
 Spark our curiosity and sense of wonder
 Desire to understand
 Something that matters to us
 Answers to EQs can NOT be found
 Students must construct own answers
 Make their own meaning from information
they have gathered
 Create insight

6.  Answering such questions may
take a lifetime!
 Answers may only be tentative
 Information gathering may
take place outside of formal
learning environments
 Engage students in real life
applied problem solving
 EQs lend themselves to
multidisciplinary
investigations.
Essential Questions(EQs)

7.  Framed by students themselves
 Best to start with subsidiary
questions that might help
support the main question
 Formulate categories of related
questions
 “What else do we need to know?
 State suppositions
 Hypothesizing and Predicting
 Thought process helps provide a
basis for construction of meaning.
Ideal Essential Questions

8. What is an Essential Question?
 Is open-ended; that is, it typically will not have a single,
final, and correct answer.
 Is thought-provoking and intellectually engaging, often
sparking discussion and debate.
 Calls for higher-order thinking, such as analysis,
inference, evaluation, prediction. It cannot be effectively
answered by recall alone.
 Points toward important, transferable ideas within (and
sometimes across) disciplines.
 Raises additional questions and sparks further inquiry.
 Requires support and justification, not just an answer.
 Recurs over time; that is, the question can and should be
revisited again and again.

9. • Whose "story" is this?
• How can we know what really happened in the past?
• How should governments balance the rights of individuals with the
common good?
• Should _______ (e.g., immigration, media expression) be restricted or
regulated? When? Who decides?
• Why do people move?
• How do maps and globes reflect history, politics, and economics?
• What is worth fighting for?
• Is there ever a "just" war?
• How do citizens (both individually and collectively) influence government
policy?
• How does technological change influence people's lives? … economic
growth? … society?
• What does it mean to be “civilized”? What makes a civilization?
Download McTighe’s Essential Question Resources for Essential Questions for Social
Studies - https://jaymctighe.com/resources/#1521225059546-51d65de1-41c2
Essential Questions in History
and Social Studies

10. Understanding by Design
ByJayMcTigheandGrantWiggins
 UbD framework helps focus curriculum and
teaching on the development and deepening
of student understanding and transfer of
learning (i.e., the ability to effectively use
content knowledge and skill).
 Understanding is revealed when students
autonomously make sense of and transfer
their learning through authentic
performance.
 Six Facets of Understanding - Indicators
 capacity to explain, interpret, apply, shift
perspective, empathize, and self-assess

11. UdB: Backwards Design
 Effective curriculum is planned backward from long-term,
desired results through a three-stage design process
 Desired Results
 Evidence
 Learning Plan
 Avoid common problems:
 Treating the textbook as the curriculum rather than a resource, and
 Activity-oriented teaching in which no clear priorities and purposes are
apparent.
 Teachers are coaches of understanding, not mere purveyors of
content knowledge, skill, or activity.
 Focus on ensuring that learning happens, not just teaching (and
assuming that what was taught was learned)
 Aim and check for successful meaning making and transfer by the learner.
https://www.ascd.org/ASCD/pdf/siteASCD/publications/UbD_WhitePaper0312.pdf

12. Understanding by Design
 Desired Results: What will
the student learn?
 Acceptable Evidence: How
will you design an
assessment that accurately
determines if the student
learned what he/she was
supposed to learn?
 Lesson Planning: How do
you design a lesson that
results in student learning?
Determine
acceptable
evidence
Plan learning
experiences
and
instruction
Identify
desired
results

13. Understanding by Design and
“Big Ideas”
 What are the big ideas?
 Core concepts
 Focusing themes
 On-going debates/issues
 Insightful perspectives
 Illuminating
paradox/problem
 Organizing theory
 Overarching principle
 Underlying assumption
 What’s the evidence?
 How do we get there?
Represent a big idea having
enduring value beyond the
classroom
Reside at the heart of
the discipline (involve
“doing” the subject)
Require
uncoverage (of
abstract or often
misunderstood
ideas)
Offer
potential for
engaging
students
Enduring
Understanding

14. Understanding by Design
Will this lesson lead to enduring understanding?
Worth being familiar with
Important to know
and do
Enduring
Understanding

15. Grant Wiggins Video on UdB

16. Understanding by Design
Assessment
AssessmentTypes
 Traditional quizzes and
tests
 Paper/pencil
 Selected response
 Constructed response
 Performance tasks and
projects
 Open-ended
 Complex
 Authentic
Performance tasks and projects need assessments that
are more authentic than traditional quizzes and tests.

17. Understanding by Design
Performance Tasks
and Projects
 Open-ended
 Complex
 Authentic
Summative Culminating
Activity
 Project
 Product or Publication
 Performance or Presentation
 Exhibition
Performance tasks and projects
need assessments that are more
authentic than traditional quizzes
and tests.

18. Assessments:
Entry Level, Progress Monitoring, and
Summative
 How will you know that students learned what
you expected them to learn?
 What types of assessment might be most
reliable in determining student
understanding or level of proficiency?
 What skills do your students need to develop in
order to build knowledge of the content?
 What kinds of activities will result in
students being able to develop those skills and
express their knowledge and understanding?

19. Curriculum Planning
for Enduring Understanding
 How will you engage your students in this topic?
 How do you hook them in with your “anticipatory
set”?
 How will you motivate students to think critically and
explore essential questions?
 How will you move beyond “recall” to problem
solving?
 How will your lessons result in “enduring
understanding” of key issues in society?
 What will students do, create, or present to express
their knowledge and understanding?

20. Common Core State Standards
English Language Arts and
History and Social Studies
Students need to be ready for college, workforce, and
life in a technological society. They need the ability to:
 Gather, comprehend, evaluate, synthesize, and
report on information and ideas.
 Conduct original research in order to answer
questions or solve problems.
 Analyze and create a high volume and extensive
range of print and nonprint texts in media forms
old and new.

21. Research to Build and
Express Knowledge
 Gather relevant information from multiple
authoritative print and digital sources, using
advanced searches effectively.
 Assess the strengths and limitations of each
source in terms of the task, purpose, and
audience.
 Integrate and evaluate content presented in
diverse formats and media, including visually
and quantitatively, as well as in words.

22. Visuals and Technology
 Interpret information presented visually, orally, or
quantitatively (e.g., in charts, graphs, diagrams, time
lines, animations, or interactive elements on Web
pages)
 Translate quantitative or technical information
expressed in words in a text into visual form (e.g., a
table or chart) and translate information expressed
visually or mathematically (e.g., in an equation) into
words.
 Take advantage of technology’s capacity to link to
other information and to display information
flexibly and dynamically.

23. Digital Media Production
 Make strategic use of digital media (e.g.,
textual, graphical, audio, visual, and interactive
elements) in presentations to enhance
understanding of findings, reasoning, and
evidence and to add interest.
 Use technology, including the Internet, to
produce, publish, and update individual or
shared writing products