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This is a really exciting time to be an educator in general,
but a teacher in particular.
All of the teachers that are involved in this process--
both last year and this year-- are teachers and administrators
whose school districts signed up to be part of the grant project.
They're going to be very involved
in the creation of these units.
JAY McTIGHE: By virtue of involving hundreds of teachers,
the Massachusetts Race to the Top Project has,
I think, achieved two outcomes.
One is the production of model curriculum units
that really reflect the standards
and a new emphases on the standards.
But secondly, by involving so many people
in designing model curriculum units,
they've really raised the understanding base
throughout the state.
PHELPS: Understanding by Design is a particular design model
for curriculum development.
That's the model that we've selected.
There's so much power in teachers and administrators
understanding this process
and really thinking about their students.
The work of the design teams is really critical.
We're working to develop model units and saying,
"Here are some possibilities for how you can implement
"these standards in your classroom,
"how you could incorporate Common Core literacy standards
"that impact the other academic areas into these units,
and at the end of the day, get to a performance assessment."
Is there something else to make it more exciting?
Understanding by Design doesn't mandate, certainly,
that a curriculum is designed by a team.
I have to say through the process
that we've been engaged in,
you can see the benefit of a team.
I have a group of three: one teacher and two supervisors.
And they're developing a unit on financial literacy.
COLOMBO: You absolutely have to have the time for conversation
and the teachers need support to make it happen,
and it needs to be sustained over the long haul.
JUDI ALLEN: There's three teachers in the group.
They're pretty well-versed now in UBD.
And were going at, you know, a faster pace,
and I also think a very rich unit.
I do think this is a really big project.
And I've been thoroughly impressed
with the Department of Ed's commitment to actually sit
with teachers and educators and figure it out.
How are we getting there?
What does this mean?
How do we do this together?
Clearly, we want the teacher voice,
the teacher fingerprints all over these units.
McTIGHE: We're shifting from a coverage approach to teaching
to a focus on instruction where we're working
to really help students develop and deepen understanding
of important transferable ideas,
and have multiple opportunities
to transfer their learnings to new situations.
It's a different world now than when we went to school,
and we need to prepare our students
for that very different world.
DEREK VANDEGRIFT: Right now, I'm working
with a team of educators.
We are working to create a unit around Western expansion.
Look at the standard, US 1.26, and see if the descriptors
or what the standard is asking us to do
is reflected in your unit.
In the state standards, our goal that we established,
that phrase, "It's growing diplomatic assertiveness."
You know, it really... it has some meat to it,
it has some feeling to it, some connotation to it.
It's interesting with the standards
because we have so many of them now.
You think about the technology standards,
the social studies standards, literacy standards.
Working with the Department of Ed,
it's become more clear that we put in the standards
that we're intentionally teaching.
VANDEGRIFT: I think we hit most of the major points
included in the standard.
I know that I've already begun working on a lesson
about the Monroe Doctrine.
"Why do people move?"
was one of the bigger essential questions,
and clearly when you think about that,
that transcends westward expansion.
Sometimes people move for these naive views
of what they're going to get on the other side.
ALLEN: So when we first begin the process,
we might begin with the standard.
What are the history frameworks, say,
that kids should know and be able to do?
And then we think about understandings.
At the end of the unit,
what do you think all students should know?
You can actually look at the students in front of you
and say, "What will they relate to?
What should I use?"
Teachers and students get to create and pose
essential questions.
At the end of your unit, what is it that
they're going to take way and use someplace else
that has nothing to do with this content?
VANDEGRIFT: It's always nice to have somebody
that has a deep knowledge of the big picture.
The facilitators are invaluable in that regard.
Spend a lot of time at each table with each group
answering questions,
asking questions that push their thinking.
That will lead to a better product.
That's in ELA,
that's really in the Common Core literacy standards.
So we will be identifying those, and that one will be covered.
VANDEGRIFT: I think one of the things
that this process forces you to do,
it forces you to start with the ends in mind.
What are the student outcomes that you hope to achieve?
COLOMBO: I guess you could say part of stage one, really,
behind the scenes is all that evaluation
of the text material that you're going to be using
for your unit.
It was quite a struggle for them at the beginning
because they were expecting something more literary.
"Here's an English language arts unit we want you to plan
around this book about personal finance."
And we were like, "What are you guys doing to us?
"Like, this is... this should be math.
"Like, why do we have it?
What are we doing with it?"
And after lots of pushing and shoving and questioning,
finally we wrapped our brains around it,
and we were off and running.
Really, what it's about is the different ways
that you can acquire content knowledge,
which is through both literature and informational text.
There's all these other resources,
and we can make this a lesson about, you know,
we take these two books and we say,
"Well, what's the difference between these two books?
"What information in here is different
"than the information in here?
And so how does that inform what we know about the content?"
Our literacy standards around reading informational text
that we want to focus on, there's writing standards
around having an opinion and being able to cite evidence
from a text to support your opinion.
And then there's that financial literacy piece,
and we chose the standards around personal finance
and making sure that you know the consequences
or alternatives to your decision-making.
They were able to bring together a whole text set
that will develop the idea for personal financial literacy
for fifth graders, but also promote
some of the literacy goals
because they've also incorporated
some narrative literature into it.
So they've expanded it
beyond the original simply informational text
to include narrative, and now they can intersect the two.
Part of the process of working through
the first part of the unit
before you even get into lesson planning
and like, you just...
and activities, and you have to go through
exactly what it is you want the kids to walk away from.
COLOMBO: All the components of stage one
need to fit together really well
because that's the foundation on which the unit is built,
first looking at the standards, which are the goals,
and those are drawn from the Massachusetts frameworks.
From that, trying to determine what's the understanding
we want children to achieve.
And then pair that down, refine that a little bit more
into content and skills.
What content do they need to get there?
What skills will help them to understand that content
a little bit better?
And then we thought about, okay, how can students apply that
and demonstrate that in a real-life situation?
So we just start really brainstorming ideas
and then going back and forth between stage one and stage two
to make sure that it was aligned correctly.
ALLEN: Stage one is in fairly good shape.
Looking at stage two and the evidence,
so far the only thing you have included in there
is the CEPA, or the performance task.
The CEPA is a curriculum embedded performance assessment.
It's a mouthful, so it's easier to say CEPA.
And it's a performance assessment,
it's more than just what many of us
grew up with in school; a test or a quiz.
We're asking students to do something authentic
with what they know.
And so we were batting around the idea of choose a character
in the book that you read
and talk about the financial decisions he or she made.
HICKEY: Our CEPA is hovering around what they've learned
about financial literacy or managing money.
And also connecting it
to some literary novels that they've read
and talking about the decisions that characters made.
And then to take that and connect it to something
that you've read in one of the reference books.
"Why do I have to do this?", students always ask.
And I think the CEPA lends itself to that.
You're teaching them that
this is how these skills will transfer in life.
This is relevant.
You will use it later.
I found this really interesting article
about how The Gap had actually created
these black and white t-shirts
that say "Manifest Destiny" on them.
And there's been outcry
from the American Civil Liberties Union.
It shows the kids that the issue still lives on.
And I think it also provides a link to essential questions
that are coming later.
You know, what happens when cultures collide?
I think showing them that these themes have occurred
and this is how people have responded
and these themes still go on today
and it does apply to their life
and it can be used to prevent things in the future,
I think that's very essential.
VANDEGRIFT: Now that we've gotten deeper into it,
we're making the decision based on the right reason,
which is connecting themes, big ideas.
I think we should look at the rubric.
A rubric is so the student knows what the expectations are
for whatever is being assessed.
When we assess them, we want to give them
the rubric upfront so they know where this is heading
and what they're going to be held responsible for.
Students actually work in pairs to try to answer the questions.
And for any questions that they don't have
immediate answers to, they have to kind of come up
with where they would look for the information.
PEMBER: The Common Core rubrics
that they've provided as sort of a base guideline,
those are the ones we're using as the template,
and then tweaking them a little bit, customizing them
to what we think fits better with our unit.
So we're going to transition now to stage three.
Let's really think seriously
about where we're going with this,
how we want to organize it.
When you get down to stage three,
you create a learning plan.
That is almost an outline of a lesson plan.
But you want to make sure that we're really getting at
the understanding and the transfer
as we designed in stage one.
So what is the skill you're looking for the students
to get out of this activity?
VANDEGRIFT: Being able to take the literacy standards
that we highlighted in our stage one
so there's alignment there.
The learning plan matches with those outcomes
that we intend to get to, with those desired student results.
PEMBER: And then the last stage is sort of the finesse,
the editing part.
Going through and making sure, are these directions clear?
I think we need to be really explicit
in the very beginning to the teachers
about how this all is connected.
So they're thinking about all these dimensions--
growing, spending, earning, borrowing money--
and how are we teaching them about that?
Through a picture book, through the informational text.
HICKEY: If you're a teacher who knows that your kids
will not independently read, you can separate your time
with the three groups and do it more like a guided reading,
kind of, you know, small group instruction
where two groups are working independently,
and you pull one that you know you need to scaffold for.
ALLEN: UBD really works well for tailoring instruction
and thinking about the diverse learners
that teachers have in their classroom.
HICKEY: The purpose of informational text
is learning about the features.
You want them to have this, you want to know why
the author used the features that he or she used.
It's interesting for students and for teachers
to see what really hit those understandings home.
How did students really have access?
And the answer is it's different for all students.
COLOMBO: You're building the knowledge and skill
very purposefully to meet the end goal,
which is to demonstrate it through the CEPA.
So I had the opportunity to work with different groups
that are designing units for this project.
Welcome, I look forward to hearing about your work
on US history unit, on westward expansion.
So I want to hear just a brief overview
of the unit you've been developing.
It's a great checkpoint to look at the work we've done
on the unit so far and kind of inform our direction.
So this unit fits into United States 1 curriculum.
We planned it for ninth grade, but it's high school level.
McTIGHE: The westward expansion unit was a very good unit
around a rich topic.
We have about six lessons, finishing with the CEPA
all in westward expansion with the themes:
why do people move, why do we expand west,
what happens when we clash with other cultures?
The question "Why do people move?"
is one that's historically apt.
You can apply it to looking at westward expansion,
but you could also apply it to other aspects of history.
I think this is a great essential question.
Its open-ended, there's not a single answer to it,
and yet it's a transferable question.
We think it is rich, and the questions
will present and emerge in future lessons.
So we want to be able to do the unit,
but again, keep it in a manageable format.
Yeah, I think that's absolutely right.
The challenge of making the unit more manageable,
making it something that teachers will actually do
and not just take parts of
or just say, "This is too much, I'm not doing it,"
that was a question we had for Jay.
Don't be opposed to maybe going back into stage one
and making some further adjustments.
It's very common.
You might also, as you work on criteria
and rubric for the CEPA, you may go back and fine-tune
the directions a little bit in the CEPA.
Meeting with a consultant
I think has a couple of benefits.
One would be that they're getting a viewpoint
from someone who is perhaps more experienced in that area.
Secondly, they can get some affirmation from someone
who they know the can trust.
I know you've worked on a unit on financial literacy.
We are using nonfiction anchor texts
also with fiction texts together to teach the kids
first about financial literacy and personal financial use,
and then kind of looking at characters in fiction books
and seeing how they used money and make the connections
to what they've learned with the nonfiction texts.
It was a very interesting confluence, if you will,
of having kids read informational text
around the topic of financial literacy
but then in a very ingenious way, link it to literature.
How well-aligned do you think our CEPA is
to the enduring understandings and essential questions?
McTIGHE: The performance task had the students play the role
of financial advisors to characters from literature
and analyzing their financial decisions or actions,
explaining the consequences of them and advising them
how they could become more financially literate
and responsible.
This is such a good example
of what the Common Core standard is encouraging,
but it's so different from what we've typically done.
(children's indistinct chatter)
McTIGHE: One of the things that Understanding By Design
brings to the party
is the need to really focus and prioritize our teaching
around a small number of larger ideas.
Ideas that are worth understanding.
PEMBER: It does all work out in the end.
And I think when I first started looking at this,
I thought it had to be very linear,
that you started with the end result
and worked backwards from there.
But it's a flow, it's... you can jump from stage one,
to stage three, to stage two.
It doesn't have to go in those orders,
it doesn't have to go backwards.
We don't want an education
where we just deliver something to teachers
and then they deliver it to kids.
Which is what UBD is all about, really customizing
for the students in front of you.
We'll see students being able to demonstrate that
not only that they know information,
which is important for them to know information,
but that they can do something with it.
That's where the rubber hits the road,
and that's what we're asking these teachers
to think about right now,
that end result of students sharing their knowledge
and their skills with us in really meaningful real ways,
we will have transformed what happens in school.
Oh, it ends by year.
That makes sense.