I have so far written three posts about understanding by design. The first is about my issues about DepEd’s adoption of understanding by design (UbD), the second is about the information posted about UbD Philippines in WikiPilipinas and the third is about curriculum change and UbD. These posts are very popular especially for readers from the Philippines. This is understandable as our Department of Education wants teachers to implement UbD this June 2010, barely two months from now. I don’t know if there’s a training out there about UbD for our public school teachers. Maybe they will have one, a week before the school year starts this June.
Anyway, I am writing this post because some readers land on this blog searching for things like “how to teach algebra using UbD”, “teaching integers the UbD way”, etc. I don’t know if they are just looking for lesson plans using UbD which they will never find in this blog or there’s a misconception out there that UbD is a way of teaching. It is not. It is more a way of planning your lesson rather than how to teach your lesson. In fact the only difference that I see between UbD and the current way of planning the lesson is in the format, not in the way you will actually teach the lesson. UbD says theirs uses backward design. In this model you start with thinking on how you will assess understanding before selecting and organizing your learning activities. For lack of term, let’s call the traditional method forward design. In this model you think about how you will assess understanding after selecting and organizing your learning activities. In both models of course you start with your learning goals. In UbD it’s called enduring understanding, in the traditional one it is called objectives.
I attended an international conference on science and mathematics teaching a few months ago. One of the parallel session presenter reported her research which compares the use of UbD way of planning the lesson and their so called usual way of planning the lesson for science. She said the class taught using UbD performed better than the one taught using the traditional one. So I asked why is that? She said that it’s because the class taught using UbD used inquiry-based teaching and the class taught using the traditional lesson plan format was taught by lecture method. So I asked further: In your country’s traditional way of planning the lesson, is it not possible to organize the lesson using inquiry-based teaching and teach it that way. She said, “of course we can, and we do. It depends upon the teacher”. There you go. Backward or forward design, it’s still the teaching and not the format nor the way the lesson plan is prepared that spells the difference in learning.