Understanding UbD through a UbD Approach

By: Noedy D. Balasa

What is Understanding by Design or UbD to you? Is it significant? How significant is it to a student like you? Can you imagine the situation of secondary students in their classrooms who experience UbD now?
Learning a lesson through UbD is like eating a banana without peeling it or harvesting rice without sowing it first. It’s vague, isn’t it? How can you eat banana without removing the skin? Where will you get the grains of rice that you will harvest if you have not sown it yet?
Can you see how vague, UbD is?
In theory these examples can have answers. And if you have thought about the questions deeply you will know the answer. The banana can be eaten from the inside. Just look at the ant—he bores a hole at the skin and eats the banana from the inside. In UbD, you will be able to analyze the questions well and come to think that peeling a banana is not the only way of eating the banana. In UbD you can harvest rice without planting it. For example, you can say that you will still be able to do this because rice grew in your vacant lot all by itself or someone planted rice for you. That is how teachers do UbD. They invite students to develop critical thinking.

What is UbD?
Grant Wiggins, Denise Wilbur, and Jay McTighe, the people behind the original concepts of UbD even said, “UbD is a way of thinking purposefully about curricular plan¬ning and school reform, a set of helpful design tools, and design standards -- not a program or recipe.”
The end goal of UbD is understanding and the ability to transfer learning. The evidence of understanding is revealed through performance when learners transfer knowledge, skills, and values effectively us¬ing one or more Facets of Learning. In UbD, these facets include explaining, interpreting, applying, shifting per¬spectives, empathizing, and self-assessment.
UbD is composed of three stages for a teacher: Goals (setting various concepts in order of their importance), Valid Evidence (conduct of assessments through the use of GRASPS) and Aligned Learning Activities (making the backwards design learning plan using WHERETO). For the students, UbD is a series of four simultaneous phases which are explore, firm-up, deepen and transfer.

How to teach UbD?
A teacher prepares first his UbD lesson by dropping first the three stages of UbD.
In the Philippines, the Department of Education has already prepared sets of teaching guides specified for each subject area and year level so planning for a UbD lesson will not be that hard because the teacher will now simply read the teaching guide and prepare related instructional materials that he would use in the conduct of his lesson.
He is then ready to implement his lesson on the classroom.

Hop into a UbD Lesson
“Our lesson today is about the operational definition of Biology and its branches of disciplines along with the sub disciplines and scope of each,” that is how a teacher intones the start of a monotonous and boring lesson in the traditional lecture-discussion method. But in UbD the intro is different like say for example:
“OK, class… group yourselves into of five members at the count of five… 1… 2… 3… 4… 5… Now, brainstorm among your group on: (1) what do you already know about biology?, (2) what you want to learn about biology?, and (3) what you think are the concepts we will discuss in biology?”
After several minutes of brainstorming, the students will be given time to prepare for a report in front of the entire class and submit an individualized written output on their activity. Later on the entire class would be very busy listening to various ideas about the lesson. This is what occurs in Phase 1: Explore where schema is activated and background experiences drawn out.
Then there will be a new activity after that, the teacher will either show a film, give a lecture, design a laboratory experiment, allow for experiencing a simulation and many other interactive classroom strategies which will make the students learn the concepts in a fast manner. This is Phase 2: Firm-Up where students learn the knowledge, skill and value from the lesson.
Next is Phase 3: Deepen where students plan the most suitable performance activity that they will show in their culminating program using the knowledge, skill and value that they have learned from the lesson. Using Biology as the core lesson, they plan for a field trip in a Biology laboratory facility where there will be examples of the disciplines in Biology.
Last is Phase 4: Transfer where students apply, synthesize, analyze and evaluate their knowledge, skill, and value that they have learned from the lesson through implementing the plan of performance activity in their culminating program. In our case, they would attend a field trip in a Biology laboratory facility which they have planned.

UbD reflects a “continuous improvement” approach to design and learning. The results of curriculum design and use of assessment results, quality of student work, and degree of learner engagement inform the teacher of the necessary adjustments, improvements of the design as well as the achievement, which is always possible. Tools are provided for self-assessment and adjustment in UbD.