Product Description: The highly anticipated second edition of Understanding by Design poses the core, essential questions of understanding and design, and provides readers with practical solutions for the teacher-designer. The book opens by analyzing the logic of backward design as an alternative to coverage and activity-oriented plans. Though backward from habit, this approach brings more focus and coherence to instruction. The book proposes a multifaceted approach, with the six “facets” of understanding. The facets combine with backward design to provide a powerful, expanded array of practical tools and strategies for designing curriculum, instruction, and assessments that lead students at all grade levels to genuine understanding. The second edition, a refined work, has been thoroughly and extensively revised, updated, and expanded, including improvement of the UbD Template, the key terms of UbD, dozens of worksheets, and some of the larger concepts. The authors have successfully put together a text that demonstrates what best practice in the design of learning looks like, enhancing for its audience their capability for creating more engaging and effective learning, whether the student is a third grader, a college freshman, or a faculty member.
Somewhat helpful book For new teachers like myself, this is a useful guide to a new way of designing lesson/unit plans. Good Luck!
Practical and Useful This book is part of required reading for a class I am taking. So far, I've read about 3-4 chapters and the best part of this book is that the concepts it introduces can be applied right away. It's not a how-to type book - it really does force you to think about your own curriculum & content, but it does help with structure & organization of content. It's also useful if you have a difficult time "getting started" on framing out class material.
Fresh approach to curriculum design I've used this book for three years in my graduate Curriculum Design courses for teachers. My students are practicing teachers who have seen dozens of lesson planning approaches and don't need some new theory just for the fun of it. But Wiggins and McTighe present a fresh perspective that doesn't so much replace as reposition traditional approaches. It boils down to what they call backward design--or identifying learning outcomes and assessments before addressing fun activities or how to meet state standards. This means the fun activities, state standards, and building or district level lesson plan formats all work with their system--they just remind us all to figure out the purpose of a lesson before committing the "twin sins" of merely entertaining the students or covering the material.
Understanding Unit Design The book is excellent in its comprehensive scope of unit design. The size of the book is awkward but easy for making copies. The writing of the book is at times hard to read. Perhaps it's a bit too comprehensive in its scope and evaluation of unit design.
Understanding By Design I bought this book because I needed to learn about UbD's for my new district this year. I thought that the book was well laid out and gave you a great framework for the UbD's but there was so much flab in between. There were a lot of pages that I felt like I could skip through. I do not know if that is because I graduated with an Education degree and therefore I knew most of the things they said in this book or if it because it repeats itself a lot. Overall I think this book is great for college students just starting in the profession.
Anything Goes Trivia
Megaton Man
Trevor
