Response to Modulo A and F (UbD)

            While reading these chapters, Understanding by Design was the main topic. This is the idea of teaching not just skills to students, but overall concepts. This is because “understanding is revealed when students autonomously make sense of and transfer their learning through authentic performance” (1). Students must be able to relate the content that they are learning to something previously learned so that they can transfer that knowledge to what they are now learning. The concepts must be applicable in many situations. This will help them recall the information later on in the school year whether it is on a test or maybe the NECAPs.

            As stated previously, it is vital that we teach students a concept rather than just a skill. This is going to be difficult to those teachers who are already set on their ways of teaching a section and then testing their students on it. What many teachers don’t realize is that “this approach leads to surprisingly poor test results, because students do not recognize prior learning in unfamiliar-looking test questions” (2).  Teaching overall concepts instead of skills will increase the students’ depth of knowledge. They will then be better off when taking standardized tests that aren’t offered right after they have learned the concept.

            When teaching using the Understanding by Design approach, most success has been found when teachers use the Backward Design approach to planning a lesson. This is when teachers start their plans with determining what they want their students to gain from learning this content. Once that is determined, the teacher must decide how they will determine if their students have understood what has been taught. For example, how the students will be tested on the subject matter. Last, the teacher decides how they will teach the concepts to his or her students so that these results will be evident. This design makes sense to me because it allows you to know what you expect of your students before you begin teaching them as the authors put it, “our job is to prioritize, make interesting and useful, and ‘uncover’ the content, not merely ‘cover’ it” (7). This is a very simple idea that makes the most sense. Why would you want to teach your students useless information?

            Understanding by Design is a great approach that I feel all teachers should incorporate in their classrooms. It is the idea of teaching students concepts that they can apply to different problems. It is the idea of teaching students not just things that they need to know to do well on the test, but things that they can use. It is the idea of knowing what you want your students to get out of the lesson before teaching the lesson to alleviate any unnecessary and irrelevant material. Understanding by Design needs more recognition by teachers so that our students can retain content throughout the years, instead of retaining it just for the time of the unit.

Review of the Wilhelm Chapters

            Strategic Reading: Guiding Students to Lifelong Literacy, 6-12 was a great except to read. I read chapters one and two and found myself surrounded with many great ideas for teaching. The most important idea I found was the learning-centered teaching guide. This model has four steps: “I do you watch”, “I do you help”, “You do I help”, and “You do I watch” (Wilhelm 11). This idea of learning-centered teaching is the best way for students to fully grasp what they are learning, while at the same time, you as the teacher will not be helping them too much. This model brings to light Vygotsky’s well-known idea of scaffolding and the zone of proximal development. “When students have had enough support and practice with a particular task… the ante of instruction can then be raised and a task in a new zone of proximal development approached”  (Wilhelm 20). This is very important when teaching students. They must constantly be moving their zones of proximal development so that they can continue to reach their maximum potential of learning and understanding.

            Wilhelm further explained that the curriculum-centered model of teaching and learning is most predominantly used in the middle and high school levels. This is when teachers are giving lectures to students and the students must regurgitate that information back to the teacher on a test. This is not a good model for learning because “the knowledge is declarative, decontextualized, and inert… knowledge is not constructed nor applied” (Wilhelm 10). The student does not think for himself when this type of teaching is occurring in the classroom. Later on, the student cannot recall this information because he didn’t have to come up with anything on his own. There was no real thought that went into the learning, just memorization.

            These chapters by Wilhelm reminded me of the important ideas from Vygotsky that we must apply in our own classrooms to make the most out of our teaching efforts. It is important as we get closer and closer to becoming teachers that we realize the best way for a student to learn. This means that we cannot lecture students for 50 minutes a day. If we want the student to not only learn but to enjoy our classrooms, we must make it a community of learning. We are not the all and powerful teachers who know everything. We must allow the students to learn first hand how and why something is the way it is. We must teach them in steps, allowing the student to master a particular strategy and then allow them to move on to a different approach as Wilhelm explained in the learning–centered teaching guide. We cannot start our teaching in the “I do you watch” phase and then skip to the “you do I watch” phase the very next example. It is a process of learning. Once we realize that learning is a shared and interactive idea, is when the students will learn to the best of their abilities.