UbD Enduring Understandings

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UbD Enduring Understandings Essential
Questions Stage 1

• Dr. Robert Mayes
• University of Wyoming
• Science and Mathematics Teaching Center
• rmayes2_at_uwyo.edu

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Caution Assessing for understanding is not as
easy as it appears

• Minds of Our Own
• Thin Air
• http//www.learner.org/resources/series26.html

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Evidence of Understanding

• Think like an assessor
• Conventional Design
• Stage 1 Stage 3 Stage 2
• Assessor (Backward) Design
• Stage 1 Stage 2 Stage 3
• Stage 1 Desired results enduring idea
• Stage 2 Evidence assessment tasks
• Stage 3 Learning Plan - activity

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Stage 1 Desired Results 4 categories

• Established Goals (G)
• National, state, local, professional standards,
  program objectives, learner outcomes
• Enduring Understandings (U)
• What we want students to come to understand about
  the big ideas
• Essential Questions (Q)
• Open-ended provocative questions designed to
  guide student inquiry and focus on uncovering big
  ideas
• Knowledge and Skills (KS)
• Discrete objectives students are to know and be
  able to do

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Desired Results

• Design Elements Overview Handout (GUQKS)
• Structure of Knowledge Activity (KSU)

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Identifying Enduring Understandings (Activity
KSU)

• Background field of possible content, topics,
  skills and resources
• Cannot address all so obligated to make choices

Worth being familiar with
Important to know and do
Enduring Understanding
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Identifying EnduringUnderstandings

• Worth Being Familiar With (Largest Ring)
• Expose to broad brush knowledge but do not
  require mastery
• Assess through quizzes and tests

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Identifying Enduring Understandings

• Important to Know and Do (Middle Ring)
• Important knowledge facts, concepts and
  principles
• Important skills processes, strategies and
  methods
• Mastery by students is prerequisite for success
  in accomplishing key performances (understanding)
• Enduring Understanding (Smallest Ring)
• Anchor unit and establish rationale for it
• Big Ideas Why is this worth studying?
• Assessed by Performance

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Essential Questions

• Staying focused on enduring understandings is
  accomplished by
• Framing goals in terms of essential questions
• Specifying the desired understandings
• Specifying key performance tasks
• Write-out What is an essential question?
• Students take turns providing their
  interpretation of the above question from reading
  Chapter 5 by writing a word or phase on the
  board. Students cannot talk, but they can write
  responses to other students input.

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Essential Questions

• Provocative questions and big ideas lead to
  engaging students in inquiry, uncovering ideas,
  and developing understanding
• Avoids activity-orientation or coverage
  orientation of teaching
• Standards make mistake of framing core content as
  factlike sentences rather than revealing them to
  be summary insights derived from questions and
  inquires

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Essential Question Characteristics

• Cause genuine and relevant inquiry into big ideas
  and core content
• Provoke deep thought, lively discussion,
  sustained inquiry, and new understanding lead to
  new questions
• Require students to consider alternatives, weigh
  evidence, support their ideas, and justify
  answers
• Stimulate vital, ongoing rethinking of big ideas,
  assumptions, and prior lessons
• Spark meaningful connections with prior learning
  and personal experiences
• Naturally recur, creating opportunities for
  transfer to other situations and subjects

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Essential Questions - different levels of
specificity

• Overarching more abstract or general
  understandings that are transferable, broader in
  scope so involve generalizations that transcend
  the unit forming bridges to other units and
  courses
• Topical topic specific insights, generalizations
  derived from the specific content knowledge and
  skills of the unit

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Essential Questions - 4 types
Scope Scope
Intent Topical Overarching
Guiding (closed) Unit specific questions, converge toward settled understanding General questions, cut across unit/subject but still converge to desired understanding
Open Stimulate inquiry and deepen understanding of important ideas within a unit, do not converge to settled understanding Broad and deep questions that remain open in the discipline, cut across unit/subject boundaries
Need overarching to ensure transfer Need topical
to avoid aimless drifting discussions Need open
questions to promote intellectual freedom and
questioning authority
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CreatingEssential Questions

• Convert declarative statements to questions -
  Jeopardy Approach
• Standards - declarative to interrogative
• Enduring ideas
• Use 6 facets of understanding to generate
  questions

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6 Facets of Understanding

1. Explanation
2. Interpretation
3. Application
4. Perspective
5. Empathy
6. Self-Knowledge

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Insight vs. Performance

• Conundrum of Insight vs. Performance
• Performance Ability revealed in Explain,
  Interpret, and Apply Facets of Understanding
• Insight revealed in Perspective, Empathy, and
  Self-knowledge facets of Understanding
• Insight basis of discovery perceive essence of
  problem, but may have difficulty articulating it
• Performance - articulation and accuracy of
  formalized knowledge is often overvalued by
  assessor
• Communication of idea, clarity, and justification
  are part of understanding

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Essential Questions from Skills

• Important understandings are often implicit or
  embedded in skill development
• High level use of skill involves innovation,
  judgment, and efficiency
• Genuine Performance requires making choices from
  repertoire of skills to solve challenging
  problems
• To be skillful is to work purposefully and
  strategically, requires understanding of key
  principles at work

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Filter for Essential Questions Enduring
Understandings

• To what extent are the outcome statements
• enduring and transferable big ideas, having
  value beyond the classroom? (intellectual
  linchpin)
• big ideas and core processes at the heart of the
  discipline? (authentic learning, active
  constructor)
• abstract, counterintuitive, often misunderstood,
  require uncovering?
• big ideas embedded in facts, skills, and
  activities?
• Activity EQ and EU Sieve (QU)
• Activity Drafting Essential Questions (Q)

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• Dr. Robert Mayes
• University of Wyoming
• Science and Mathematics Teaching Center
• rmayes2_at_uwyo.edu