Understanding by Design (2nd Edition).

Wiggins and McTighe argue that deriving lessons, units, and syllabi from instructional goals helps avoid the twin pitfalls of activity-oriented and coverage-oriented instruction.. The ba

Understanding by Design (2nd Edition).

Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 2005 Pp xi + 371

䡲 Since it first appeared in 2000, UbD—Wiggins and McTighe’s

short-hand for Understanding by Design—has been gaining popularity as a

pro-fessional development and teacher-education resource for teaching cur-ricular content, including within the field of TESOL We offer a review

of the new and much expanded second edition of this textbook to those who conduct TESOL teacher-education programs, and to English as a second language practitioners generally We feel that UbD has much to offer the field in terms of illuminating and explicating major issues in curricular and unit planning, complex and important areas often glossed over in pre and in-service courses

According to the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Devel-opment (ASCD), UbD is a “framework for designing curriculum units, performance assessments, and instruction that lead students to deep

understanding” (ASCD, 2006) Designing implies that teachers think of

themselves as conscious engineers of experiences that maximize, deepen, and verify student learning The importance of UbD lies in this notion of teacher agency, as opposed to the all-too-common view of the teacher as “nothing but a technician trained to transmit a fixed canon of

knowledge” (Pennycook, 1989, p 612) The ambition of UbD, therefore,

is to be not another teaching resource but a tool in the struggle for professionalization, an issue of particular resonance in TESOL

The book presents UbD’s three-stage approach to curricular

develop-ment, called backward design Wiggins and McTighe argue that deriving

lessons, units, and syllabi from instructional goals helps avoid the twin

pitfalls of activity-oriented and coverage-oriented instruction

Activity-oriented instruction can be seen as a distortion of a constructivist ap-proach to teaching, in which the student-centered and cooperative-learning activities that characterize this approach become disconnected from meaningful learning goals in any systematic and accountable way The teacher, rather than being a facilitator of learner autonomy, as the approach would have it, becomes a mere stage manager of student ac-tivities Similarly, coverage-oriented instruction can be seen as an ex-treme form of direct instruction, which is predominately teacher-centered and typically highlights lecturing or explanation of facts In coverage-oriented instruction, a textbook or syllabus governs the class-room, with teachers mentioning each point, frequently to an unclear pedagogical end Wiggins and McTighe see themselves as constructivists, but they do not mandate specific pedagogical methods or techniques UbD is not a God’s-truth instructional philosophy or bag-of-tricks eclec-ticism, but a results-driven framework for curricular and instructional unit design

Backward design begins with the selection and analysis of desired re-sults, which consist of subcomponents such as established goals (including but not limited to mandated standards), understandings (deep concep-tual knowledge), and essential questions (long-standing,

inquiry-motivating problems) Once goals are more or less determined, the teacher-designer continues to the second stage, assessment Assessments may be formal or informal, must be linked to the stage-one goals, and must include redundancy to ameliorate measurement error Finally, the teacher-designer comes to stage three, the designing of learning expe-riences This sequencing is not rigid; a teacher may enter the design process at any point, and recursion inevitably ensues as teacher-designers revise objectives and assessments Still, the resultant stages or compo-nents must reflect the logic of the backward sequence The backward-design tools are clearly explained, chapter by chapter, with helpful dia-grams, templates, and well-defined terminology, all applicable to any English language instructional setting, although the fit is easiest in con-tent-based instruction

This last strength reflects the text’s primary drawback for ESOL: Treatment of skills, essential in language learning, is somewhat wanting This lack is partly inherent in any program designed around understand-ings, which is focused by definition on conceptual knowledge

Proce-dural knowledge, such as basic grammatical development and reading and writing processes, is inevitably backgrounded Wiggins and McTighe compound this problem by discussing reading as an issue and enabling skills in general, but they mention English language learners only inci-dentally Examples consequently focus almost entirely on concepts, and when skills and strategies are discussed, the result is sometimes uncon-vincing and rarely focused on language We chose UbD for our student-teaching seminars because of the difficulties our pre and in-service teacher candidates had with curricular and unit planning, particularly integrating language teaching with content and themes Some of our students took to the book instantly, but it took considerable work and supplementation to get others to see the relevance

Our suggestion is therefore that ESOL teacher educators, particularly those with a K–12 or academic focus, seriously consider adopting UbD because the the text is excellent at addressing the issues of curriculum and unit planning However, if they do so, they must take special care in addressing both sides of the language-content equation On the one hand, teacher educators will need to emphasize the role of content in developing language and literacy skills; that is, they need to emphasize that achieving understandings is necessary for linguistic growth Of course, the advantages of doing this go beyond motivating reluctant ESOL teachers to take an assigned text seriously; such an effort should help them reconceive their roles In particular, the goal should be to combat the inertia in academic ESOL teaching that permits language instruction isolated from content (e.g., the widespread practice of using grammar-in-situation type textbooks)

On the other hand, teacher educators using UbD should make ex-plicit the various language and literacy skills that learners need for con-tent-area learning and particularly how they can fit those skills into the UbD framework We suggest the following (nonexhaustive) list of skills that could be incorporated into stage one of backward-designed, English language teaching curricula: metacognitive, cognitive, socioaffective, and communication strategies; reading and listening skills; the writing process; phonetic–phonemic discrimination; attention to lexical and grammatical form; and note-taking Such areas need not be covered exhaustively, as in a methods class; however, mentioning them in their role in accessing content knowledge allows present and future English language teachers to make the connection to classroom practice

A lesser problem that needs addressing is that Wiggins and McTighe sometimes assume knowledge that is not widespread, always a danger in

a multidisciplinary resource For instance, a discussion of non-Euclidean geometry used to exemplify the recursive nature of scientific knowledge confused our teacher candidates Thus, we recommend that teacher educators explain such examples

In sum, despite its occasional and correctable shortcomings, this text can help fill a gap often found in TESOL programs and in English language teaching practice It is a hands-on model of curricular design that provides a framework for coherent review and integration of mate-rial previously learned in core TESOL-programmatic areas such as lesson planning, methods, L2 acquisition, and language assessment We are aware of no other comparable method that deals as well with the issues

of designing learning More broadly, it has the potential to deepen the professionalism in English language teaching specifically and teaching generally

REFERENCES

Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (2006) Understanding by

design: Resources Retrieved July 14, 2006, from http://www.ascd.org/portal/site/

ascd/menuitem.6a270a3015fcac8d0987af19e3108a0c/

Pennycook, A (1989) The concept of method, interested knowledge, and the

poli-tics of language teaching TESOL Quarterly, 23, 589–618.

F SCOTT WALTERS AND MICHAEL NEWMAN

Queens College

Flushing, New York, United States