Far too often, our students attain only a superficial level of knowledge that fails to prepare them for deeper challenges in school and beyond. In Teaching for Deeper Learning, renowned educators and best-selling authors Jay McTighe and Harvey F. Silver propose a solution: teaching students to make meaning for themselves. Contending that the ability to ""earn"" understanding will equip students to thrive in school, at work, and in life, the authors highlight seven higher-order thinking skills that facilitate students' acquisition of information for greater retention, retrieval, and transfer. These skills, which cut across content areas and grade levels and are deeply embedded in current academic standards, separate high achievers from their low-performing peers. Drawing on their deep well of research and experience, the authors: Explore what kind of content is worth having students make meaning about. Provide practical tools and strategies to help teachers target each of the seven thinking skills in the classroom. Explain how teachers can incorporate the thinking skills and tools into lesson and unit design. Show how teachers can build students' capacity to use the strategies independently. If our goal is to prepare students to meet the rigorous demands of school, college, and career, then we must foster their ability to respond to such challenges. This comprehensive, practical guide will enable teachers to engage students in the kind of learning that yields enduring understanding and valuable skills that they can use throughout their lives.

Aimed at the growing number of educators who are looking to move beyond covering the curriculum, Designing Authentic Performance Tasks and Projects provides a comprehensive guide to ensuring students' deeper learning-in which they can transfer their knowledge, skills, and understandings to the world beyond the classroom. Readers will learn how to: Create authentic tasks and projects to address both academic standards and 21st century skills. Apply task frames to design performance tasks that allow voice and choice for students. Design and use criterion-based evaluation tools and rubrics for assessment, including those for students to use in self-assessment and peer assessment. Incorporate performance-based instructional strategies needed to prepare students for authentic performance. Differentiate tasks and projects for all students, including those needing additional support or challenge. Effectively manage the logistics of a performance-based classroom. Use project management approaches to facilitate successful implementation of tasks and projects. Develop performance-based curriculum at the program, school, and district levels. Authors Jay McTighe, Kristina J. Doubet, and Eric M. Carbaugh provide examples and resources across all grade levels and subject areas. Teachers can use this practical guidance to transform their classrooms into vibrant centers of learning, where students are motivated and engaged and see relevance in the work they are doing.

How can educators leverage neuroscience research about how the human brain learns? How can we use this information to improve curriculum, instruction, and assessment so our students achieve deep learning and understanding in all subject areas? Upgrade Your Teaching: Understanding by Design Meets Neuroscience answers these questions by merging insights from neuroscience with Understanding by Design (UbD), the framework used by thousands of educators to craft units of instruction and authentic assessments that emphasize understanding rather than recall. Readers will learn: How the brain processes incoming information and determines what is (or is not) retained as long-term memory. How brain science reveals factors that influence student motivation and willingness to put forth effort. How to fully engage all students through relevance and achievable challenge. How key components of UbD, including backward design, essential questions, and transfer tasks, are supported by research in neuroscience. Why specific kinds of teaching and assessment strategies are effective in helping students gain the knowledge, skills, and deep understanding they need to succeed in school and beyond. How to create a brain-friendly classroom climate that supports lasting learning. Authors Jay McTighe and Judy Willis translate research findings into practical information for everyday use in schools, at all grade levels and in all subject areas. With their guidance, educators at all levels can learn how to design and implement units that empower teachers and students alike to capitalize on the brain's tremendous capacity for learning.

How can today's teachers, whose classrooms are more culturally and linguistically diverse than ever before, ensure that their students achieve at high levels? How can they design units and lessons that support English learners in language development and content learning-simultaneously? Authors Amy Heineke and Jay McTighe provide the answers by adding a lens on language to the widely used Understanding by Design (R) framework (UbD (R) framework) for curriculum design, which emphasizes teaching for understanding, not rote memorization. Readers will learn: The components of the UbD framework. The fundamentals of language and language development. How to use diversity as a valuable resource for instruction by gathering information about students' background knowledge from home, community, and school. How to design units and lessons that integrate language development with content learning in the form of essential knowledge and skills. How to assess in ways that enable language learners to reveal their academic knowledge. Student profiles, real-life classroom scenarios, and sample units and lessons provide compelling examples of how teachers in all grade levels and content areas use the UbD framework in their culturally and linguistically diverse classrooms. Combining these practical examples with findings from an extensive research base, the authors deliver a useful and authoritative guide for reaching the overarching goal: ensuring that all students have equitable access to high-quality curriculum and instruction.

What are ""essential questions,"" and how do they differ from other kinds of questions? What's so great about them? Why should you design and use essential questions in your classroom? Essential questions (EQs) help target standards as you organize curriculum content into coherent units that yield focused and thoughtful learning. In the classroom, EQs are used to stimulate students' discussions and promote a deeper understanding of the content. Whether you are an Understanding by Design (UbD) devotee or are searching for ways to address standards-local or Common Core State Standards-in an engaging way, Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins provide practical guidance on how to design, initiate, and embed inquiry-based teaching and learning in your classroom. Offering dozens of examples, the authors explore the usefulness of EQs in all K-12 content areas, including skill-based areas such as math, PE, language instruction, and arts education. As an important element of their backward design approach to designing curriculum, instruction, and assessment, the authors: Give a comprehensive explanation of why EQs are so important. Explore seven defining characteristics of EQs. Distinguish between topical and overarching questions and their uses. Outline the rationale for using EQs as the focal point in creating units of study. Show how to create effective EQs, working from sources including standards, desired understandings, and student misconceptions. Using essential questions can be challenging-for both teachers and students-and this book provides guidance through practical and proven processes, as well as suggested ""response strategies"" to encourage student engagement. Finally, you will learn how to create a culture of inquiry so that all members of the educational community-students, teachers, and administrators-benefit from the increased rigor and deepened understanding that emerge when essential questions become a guiding force for learners of all ages.

Teachers struggle every day to bring quality instruction to their students. Beset by lists of content standards and accompanying ""high-stakes"" accountability tests, many educators sense that both teaching and learning have been redirected in ways that are potentially impoverishing for those who teach and those who learn. Educators need a model that acknowledges the centrality of standards but also ensures that students truly understand content and can apply it in meaningful ways. For many educators, Understanding by Design addresses that need. Simultaneously, teachers find it increasingly difficult to ignore the diversity of the learners who populate their classrooms. Few teachers find their work effective or satisfying when they simply ""serve up"" a curriculum-even an elegant one-to students with no regard for their varied learning needs. For many educators, Differentiated Instruction offers a framework for addressing learner variance as a critical component of instructional planning. In this book the two models converge, providing readers fresh perspectives on two of the greatest contemporary challenges for educators: crafting powerful curriculum in a standards-dominated era and ensuring academic success for the full spectrum of learners. Each model strengthens the other. Understanding by Design is predominantly a curriculum design model that focuses on what we teach. Differentiated Instruction focuses on whom we teach, where we teach, and how we teach. Carol Ann Tomlinson and Jay McTighe show you how to use the principles of backward design and differentiation together to craft lesson plans that will teach essential knowledge and skills for the full spectrum of learners. Connecting content and kids in meaningful ways is what teachers strive to do every day. In tandem, UbD and DI help educators meet that goal by providing structures, tools, and guidance for developing curriculum and instruction that bring to students the best of what we know about effective teaching and learning.

A practical guide to more effective assessment for improved student learning

What is understanding and how does it differ from knowledge? How can we determine the big ideas worth understanding? Why is understanding an important teaching goal, and how do we know when students have attained it? How can we create a rigorous and engaging curriculum that focuses on understanding and leads to improved student performance in today's high-stakes, standards-based environment?Authors Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe answer these and many other questions in this second edition of Understanding by Design. Drawing on feedback from thousands of educators around the world who have used the UbD framework since its introduction in 1998, the authors have greatly revised and expanded their original work to guide educators across the K-16 spectrum in the design of curriculum, assessment, and instruction. With an improved UbD Template at its core, the book explains the rationale of backward design and explores in greater depth the meaning of such key ideas as essential questions and transfer tasks. Readers will learn why the familiar coverage- and activity-based approaches to curriculum design fall short, and how a focus on the six facets of understanding can enrich student learning. With an expanded array of practical strategies, tools, and examples from all subject areas, the book demonstrates how the research-based principles of Understanding by Design apply to district frameworks as well as to individual units of curriculum. Combining provocative ideas, thoughtful analysis, and tested approaches, this new edition of Understanding by Design offers teacher-designers a clear path to the creation of curriculum that ensures better learning and a more stimulating experience for students and teachers alike.

The Understanding by Design Guide to Creating High-Quality Units offers instructional modules on the basic concepts and elements of Understanding by Design (UbD), the ""backward design"" approach used by thousands of educators to create curriculum units and assessments that focus on developing students' understanding of important ideas. The eight modules are organized around the UbD Template Version 2.0 and feature components similar to what is typically provided in a UbD design workshop, including: Discussion and explanation of key ideas in the module. Guiding exercises, worksheets, and design tips. Examples of unit designs. Review criteria with prompts for self-assessment. A list of resources for further information. This guide is intended for K-16 educators—either individuals or groups—who may have received some training in UbD and want to continue their work independently; those who've read Understanding by Design and want to design curriculum units but have no access to formal training; graduate and undergraduate students in university curriculum courses; and school and district administrators, curriculum directors, and others who facilitate UbD work with staff. Users can go through the modules in sequence or skip around, depending on their previous experience with UbD and their preferred curriculum design style or approach. Unit creation, planning, and adaptation are easier than ever with the accompanying downloadable resources, including the UbD template set up as a fillable PDF form, additional worksheets, examples, and FAQs about the module topics that speak to UbD novices and veterans alike.

The highly anticipated second edition of "Understanding by Design" poses the core, essential questions of understanding and design, and provides readers with practical solutions for the teacher-designer. The book opens by analyzing the logic of backward design as an alternative to coverage and activity-oriented plans. Though backward from habit, this approach brings more focus and coherence to instruction. The book proposes a multifaceted approach, with the six "facets" of understanding. The facets combine with backward design to provide a powerful, expanded array of practical tools and strategies for designing curriculum, instruction, and assessments that lead students at all grade levels to genuine understanding. The second edition, a refined work, has been thoroughly and extensively revised, updated, and expanded, including improvement of the UbD Template, the key terms of UbD, dozens of worksheets, and some of the larger concepts. The authors have successfully put together a text that demonstrates what best practice in the design of learning looks like, enhancing for its audience their capability for creating more engaging and effective learning, whether the student is a third grader, a college freshman, or a faculty member.

Curriculum design experts Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins have reviewed thousands of curriculum documents and unit plans across a range of subjects and grades. In this book, they identify and describe the 25 most common problems in unit design and recommend how to fix them-and avoid them when planning new units. McTighe and Wiggins, creators of the Understanding by Design (R) framework, help you use the process of backward design to troubleshoot your units and achieve tighter alignment and focus on learning priorities. Whether you're working with local or national standards or with other learning goals, you can rely on their practical and proven solutions to promote deeper and better learning for your students.

A practical guide to more effective assessment for improved student learning