Grant Wiggins

When I was a forklift operator, I topped out in terms of skill pretty quickly. And one need only receive one or two truckloads of any kind of merchandise to master the warehouse worker's skills. One of the great things about being a teacher, for me, is that it is a career that offers virtually endless opportunities to improve as a practitioner; it is, therefore, never boring. Grant P. Wiggins and Jay McTighe's Understanding by Design is in all respects a guide to keep one's teaching career stimulating while serving one's students well.

Furthermore, this, I think, is simply the best guide to and for curriculum planning in print. If you want students to understand something in all its complexity as well as its connection and application to material in other domains, rather than just know something as a fact to be recalled for a test, then this is the place to start your planning agenda. That said, I particularly recommend the final chapter of the second edition, in which Messrs. Wiggins and McTighe allay anxieties about backwards design and standardized tests. In my not particularly humble opinion, this is the method of planning that should drive pedagogy in all K-12 classrooms in this country.… (más)

This was required reading for my M.A. in Jewish Education, but the UbD framework applies to all educational contexts. UbD is one of the most effective curricular design process I have studied, and I currently hold 3 master's degrees in education. UbD, as its name implies, seeks to design lesson plans such that student understanding will result. In a process also called "backward design," teachers start with the things they want their students to learn (standards), unpack lesson specific benchmarks, and then build course activities around those.… (más)