Mctighe And Wiggins, Understanding By Design Framework

One of the most important components that impact student learning without a doubt is teacher planning. How a teacher goes about creating their lesson plan has a direct influence on student learning. Therefore, Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins, Understanding by Design Framework (UbD), present a reformative plan of action towards the development of instructional planning. The two prominent ideas proposed by McTighe and Wiggins’s (2012) UbD framework are that teaching should align with assessment and transferring of the learning and therefore requiring that teachers’ design the curriculum from the end in mind or “backward’s” mindset. For this reason, I recognize three distinguishing characteristics of UbD that conceivably support the utilization by teachers. The three characteristics are it challenges the mindset of instructional practices of teachers, promotes for transferring of knowledge as a reliable indicator for learning, and utilizes theoretical research in cognitive psychology and student achievement.

In fact, many of my history colleagues would initiate their instructional lessons by identifying a particular activity or their preferred format of instruction (i.e. small groups, teacher-directed). Moreover, many of my peers would fall victim to exclusively utilizing the textbook to guide their planning, a concept that both McTighe and Wiggins challenge. With regards to this, McTighe and Wiggins argue that UbD assist teachers to “avoid the common problems of treating the textbook as the curriculum rather than a resource, and activity-oriented teaching in which no clear priorities and purposes are apparent” (p. 1). In other words, curriculum planned with an emphasis on backward ideology results in a purposeful, focused, authentic, and long-term