My individual project is the last blog post of this quarter in the Seattle Pacific University Digital Education Leadership M.Ed. program. In this post I will reflect on the process of backward planning using the understanding by design (UbD) format and reflect on what facets of understanding my students may display at the end my set of lessons. Most of what I write will be speculative since I am currently in the middle of teaching this unit and have not yet gotten to the focus lessons highlighted in the unit plan.
The UbD lesson format is time consuming when considering planning an entire unit, or even lessons in a unit. I find the work to be valuable based on how I anticipate my teaching will go when I deliver the lessons however, I found that adapting the curriculum to align with the UbD format is more time consuming that my typical planning. However, I do not want to discount the fact that planning is a process that is accelerated with additional practice, especially when adopting a new format or teaching a new unit. For me this unit is completely new, and I haven’t practiced the UbD format since my undergraduate degree, so the format could in fact be one that I begin to use again with additional practice. Also, I anticipate if I was planning one lesson in place of part of a unit it would require slightly less time. This project did offer me an excellent way to integrate digital citizenship instruction into a unit that otherwise has very little technology integration by asking students to publish final essays in a blog format and asking them to respond to each other’s work via online comments. I anticipate that both of those modifications will provide additional engagement for students in a unit that they appear to enjoy even without technology integration.
The six facets of understanding are a description from Wiggins and McTighe (2005) about what it means for students to truly understand. I will attempt to reflect on how my students will understand this content and unit based on the UbD formatting of the lessons. At the end of this unit I anticipate that my students will be able to demonstrate all of the facets of understanding because of the highly engaging content and the level of differentiation that can happen when each students is writing about a book they have chosen to read.
Students will be able to explain content and in explaining themes within a text, or character traits shared across texts, they will apply that knowledge to life and to real people which will allow them to interpret the actions of individuals.
Additionally after this unit students will become more empathetic because they will understand characters and people are multidimensional, they are not just one way. This understanding will allow students to see the big picture within a text, to understand the theme, or grasp what the author is trying to teach throughout the text. Finally students will relate the learning back to their own lives. They will wonder how they themselves are like characters in their books, or they will realize that they cannot fully understand a theme or character because they themselves do not have the life experiences necessary to understand in the way that others would.
Then in coming to that understanding I hope again that students would feel empathy and seek out different perspectives or feedback on their own thinking in order to better help them understand people and life.
The Literary Essay as an Online Review by James Bettis
Link to new window: https://jamesbettis.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/IndividualProject-JamesBettis-1.pdf
