Understanding by Design Framework Plan
The UBD fever
By NILDA R. SUNGA, Ph.D. Director for Academic Affairs, Angelicum College, Quezon City
July 11, 2010, 12:23pm
UBD means Understanding by Design, an educational framework whose main objective is to promote quality teaching and learning and whose main goal is to develop enduring understandings that are transferable to life.
UBD has, indeed, taken the country by storm. Everybody seems to be in the know. Teachers have attended UBD seminars conducted by educational entities, both public and private, but have remained in the dark simply because of the various interpretations given by resource persons and lecturers.
Dep-Ed has advocated the UBD framework as the basis for the 2010 Secondary Curriculum. As spelled out in its implementing guidelines, UBD will be in full force at the First Year Level this June 2010.
But how prepared are the teachers for this new framework? Not much or not at all.
After attending a four-day seminar with Jay McTighe in Melbourne, Australia, one of the two proponents of UBD, I’ve learned that there is one major way to kill UBD in any educational context – know a little about it and start big.
Understanding by Design consists of three stages:
Stage 1- Identifying Desired Results.
Stage 2- Determining Acceptable Assessment Evidence.
Stage 3 – Making the Learning Plan. As opposed to the traditional way of designing lessons, the UBD process is backward, i.e., a teacher has to think of the goal for every lesson and then plan backward.
For example, in the teaching of adjectives or adverbs in English, traditionally we would teach learners what adjectives/adverbs are, their types, their functions without looking at the bigger picture. With UBD, we teach modifiers to learners so that in the long run they will be able to add color, flavor, taste, and spice to life as they describe people, places, and things. We teach what matter is in science so that in the future they can discriminate between toxic and non-toxic elements,
By NILDA R. SUNGA, Ph.D. Director for Academic Affairs, Angelicum College, Quezon City
July 11, 2010, 12:23pm
UBD means Understanding by Design, an educational framework whose main objective is to promote quality teaching and learning and whose main goal is to develop enduring understandings that are transferable to life.
UBD has, indeed, taken the country by storm. Everybody seems to be in the know. Teachers have attended UBD seminars conducted by educational entities, both public and private, but have remained in the dark simply because of the various interpretations given by resource persons and lecturers.
Dep-Ed has advocated the UBD framework as the basis for the 2010 Secondary Curriculum. As spelled out in its implementing guidelines, UBD will be in full force at the First Year Level this June 2010.
But how prepared are the teachers for this new framework? Not much or not at all.
After attending a four-day seminar with Jay McTighe in Melbourne, Australia, one of the two proponents of UBD, I’ve learned that there is one major way to kill UBD in any educational context – know a little about it and start big.
Understanding by Design consists of three stages:
Stage 1- Identifying Desired Results.
Stage 2- Determining Acceptable Assessment Evidence.
Stage 3 – Making the Learning Plan. As opposed to the traditional way of designing lessons, the UBD process is backward, i.e., a teacher has to think of the goal for every lesson and then plan backward.
For example, in the teaching of adjectives or adverbs in English, traditionally we would teach learners what adjectives/adverbs are, their types, their functions without looking at the bigger picture. With UBD, we teach modifiers to learners so that in the long run they will be able to add color, flavor, taste, and spice to life as they describe people, places, and things. We teach what matter is in science so that in the future they can discriminate between toxic and non-toxic elements,