Grant Wiggins

In this valuable resource, experts share deep knowledge including practical ''how-to'' and preventive trouble-shooting tips. Instructors will learn about course design and development, instructional methods for online teaching, and student engagement and community building techniques. The book contains successful teaching strategies, guidance for facilitating interactions and responding to diversity, and assessments, as well as future directions for online learning. With many field-tested examples and practice assignments, and with voices from students, teachers, and experts, this book arms instructors and administrators with the tools they need to teach effective and empowering online courses. This one-stop resource addresses all of the core elements of online teaching in terms that are universally applicable to any content area and at any instructional level.

Curriculum design experts Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins have reviewed thousands of curriculum documents and unit plans across a range of subjects and grades. In this book, they identify and describe the 25 most common problems in unit design and recommend how to fix them—and avoid them when planning new units.McTighe and Wiggins, creators of the Understanding by Design® framework, help you use the process of backward design to troubleshoot your units and achieve tighter alignment and focus on learning priorities. Whether you're working with local or national standards or with other learning goals, you can rely on their practical and proven solutions to promote deeper and better learning for your students.

What are ""essential questions,"" and how do they differ from other kinds of questions? What's so great about them? Why should you design and use essential questions in your classroom?Essential questions (EQs) help target standards as you organize curriculum content into coherent units that yield focused and thoughtful learning. In the classroom, EQs are used to stimulate students' discussions and promote a deeper understanding of the content.Whether you are an Understanding by Design (UbD) devotee or are searching for ways to address standards—local or Common Core State Standards—in an engaging way, Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins provide practical guidance on how to design, initiate, and embed inquiry-based teaching and learning in your classroom.Offering dozens of examples, the authors explore the usefulness of EQs in all K-12 content areas, including skill-based areas such as math, PE, language instruction, and arts education. As an important element of their backward design approach to designing curriculum, instruction, and assessment, the authors:Give a comprehensive explanation of why EQs are so important.Explore seven defining characteristics of EQs.Distinguish between topical and overarching questions and their uses.Outline the rationale for using EQs as the focal point in creating units of study.Show how to create effective EQs, working from sources including standards, desired understandings, and student misconceptions.Using essential questions can be challenging—for both teachers and students—and this book provides guidance through practical and proven processes, as well as suggested ""response strategies"" to encourage student engagement. Finally, you will learn how to create a culture of inquiry so that all members of the educational community—students, teachers, and administrators—benefit from the increased rigor and deepened understanding that emerge when essential questions become a guiding force for learners of all ages.

The Understanding by Design Guide to Advanced Concepts in Creating and Reviewing Units offers instructional modules on how to refine units created using Understanding by Design (UbD) and how to effectively review the units using self-assessment and peer review, along with observation and supervision. The Guide builds upon its companion and predecessor, The Understanding by Design Guide to Creating High-Quality Units, and like the earlier volume, it presents the following components for each module:Narrative discussion of key ideas in the module.Exercises, worksheets, and design tips.Examples of unit designs.Review criteria for self- and peer assessment.References for further information.UbD is based on a backward design approach and is used by thousands of educators to create curriculum units and assessments that focus on developing students' understanding of essential ideas and helping students attain important skills. The Guide is intended for use by individuals or groups in K-16 education (teachers, school and district administrators, curriculum directors, graduate and undergraduate students in curriculum, and others) who want to further develop their skill in UbD. Users can work through the modules in order or pick and choose, depending on their interests and needs.Additional resources, including worksheets, examples, and FAQs, are available as downloadable forms (including fillable UbD templates that can be saved electronically), making it easy for UbD practitioners to advance their understanding and their ability to create curriculum that leads to deep, meaningful learning.

The Understanding by Design Guide to Creating High-Quality Units offers instructional modules on the basic concepts and elements of Understanding by Design (UbD), the ""backward design"" approach used by thousands of educators to create curriculum units and assessments that focus on developing students' understanding of important ideas. The eight modules are organized around the UbD Template Version 2.0 and feature components similar to what is typically provided in a UbD design workshop, including:Discussion and explanation of key ideas in the module.Guiding exercises, worksheets, and design tips.Examples of unit designs.Review criteria with prompts for self-assessment.A list of resources for further information.This guide is intended for K-16 educators—either individuals or groups—who may have received some training in UbD and want to continue their work independently; those who've read Understanding by Design and want to design curriculum units but have no access to formal training; graduate and undergraduate students in university curriculum courses; and school and district administrators, curriculum directors, and others who facilitate UbD work with staff. Users can go through the modules in sequence or skip around, depending on their previous experience with UbD and their preferred curriculum design style or approach. Unit creation, planning, and adaptation are easier than ever with the accompanying downloadable resources, including the UbD template set up as a fillable PDF form, additional worksheets, examples, and FAQs about the module topics that speak to UbD novices and veterans alike.

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.

Presents a multifaceted model of understanding, which is based on the premise that people can demonstrate understanding in a variety of ways.

Implementing the popular Understanding by Design® (UbD™) framework is much easier when you use this in-depth resource for workshops, curriculum teams, and teacher training. This collection of templates, design tools, examples, and exercises helps you give all staff members a firm grasp of key UbD principles, including:How to use backward design to align curriculum with assessment and instruction.Why to focus curriculum on the ""big ideas"" in your content standards.Which learning activities are more apt to enable students to achieve desired results.Give staff members at all levels clear action steps they need in every stage of the UbD process, including:Drafting curriculum units based on essential questions. Creating performance tasks and rubrics for assessing student understanding in any subject.Organizing, sequencing, and guiding classroom learning experiences.Included are steps for conducting a peer review of unit designs plus process steps to guide your implementation of UbD systemwide.