GRANT WIGGINS: UBD is not a philosophy of teaching, it's not an approach to teaching, it's a planning framework. And it's really important to keep this in mind that what you're trying to do is make it more likely by design that when you teach, you are more goal-focused, more effective. You could be a bad teacher with a good plan.
In other words, we're not saying that a good plan makes you a better teacher necessarily. You have to learn pedagogical moves, you have to learn to be as facile and skilled with how to pay attention to group dynamics. UBD doesn't help you with that, but it does prepare you to think short term, long term, what are we trying to accomplish.
And it's like the famous line from Pasteur, "chance favors the prepared mind. " You're totally prepared for teachable moments not in the sense of, oh, well that's a cool student comment. Let's just run with that for five days.
That's not serendipity. That's letting the students write the curriculum, and that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about being so prepared about where you want to end up that you hear a potential student comment as a fantastic entry point to go where you want to end up.
In other words, it's your job to know where we want to end up. I don't think we make any apologies about that. But part of where we want to end up is building autonomous, proactive, thoughtful people, not just march through some stuff causing some typical learning.
So we're trying to keep long-term goals in view. We're trying to get the blend of content and performance. Notice I didn't say process, content and performance, because that's the ultimate goal.
The student performs as in the soccer situation-- on their own, effectively, fluidly, drawing from their repertoire. And this also tends to better engage people as I think you already know. What we see over and over again is that there is a misalignment between short-term plans and actions and long-term goals.
Here's a simple example. We value something called critical and creative thinking. It's in every program's goal statement.
It's in many school's mission statement. It's clearly something we care about. But it is possible to get straight A's at every school in America without critical and creative thinking.
As long as you're smart, compliant, do your work, are thorough, you're going to get straight In almost every school in America. So a very basic backward design premise then if critical and creative thinking is the goal long term, using content critically and creatively, to say it a different way, then when we go to a plan, we have to make sure week in and week out that we're focusing on critical and creative use of content. Otherwise, we're not going to get it.
And this is, I think, the fatal mistake of prep schools. They think because we're smart, because we're motivated, because we hire really intelligent, well-educated people, that this is just going to happen. Sobering story, but this is a true story.
Well-known prep school in the top 10 or 20 of prep schools in the country, they say, we're really interested in this pedagogical effectiveness stuff. And the guy in question is a really fantastic educator who's done a lot of work in the wider world. And so he's really interested in the question of value added at this school.
So they contract with ETS, pre-assess 9th grade, assess 12th grade, critical thinking test, no gain. No gain. We admit them smart, we graduate them smart, we pat ourselves on the back, and we start teaching all over again.
The value added thing is huge. You can't just pat yourself on the back because you admit smart people when they do good things. You guys have a higher calling than that.
So we want to focus on these long-term goals and we want to embed them in our short-term plans. And the more you start to think this way, the more you'll realize you're not doing it. Again, I saw this on the soccer field.
I saw that we were not developing any strategic thinking. One day I was in a scrimmage, and I'm looking at the scrimmage. I'm there in the middle of the field reffing it.
I'm watching people and I'm saying, there's a lot of aimless running around here. So the ball's over here, what are you doing and why are you doing it? I don't know, I don't know.
So I said, all right, new rule. We are going to do freeze tag. If I don't like your answer, the ball goes over the other side.
I'm always going to have somebody on offense. And for like two weeks there was no good answer. And of course, I realize that's my fault.
There's no strategic thinking. My daughter is an elite soccer player. She's a senior at the George School.
She's in North Carolina tournament right now. She doesn't have a good strategic thinking, because she's had all these elite coaches that tell you what to do all the time. She had a coach though who doesn't coach at George School anymore.
He's a retired Princeton coach who did it for $1 a year-- one of those great gigs. He did the coolest thing at halftime. So you know, they get in the circle that you always do at halftime.
So, he said, what's working? What's working for us? Again, same thing-- for a couple of weeks, they couldn't answer.
We're winning. Yeah, I know that. What's working on the field?
What's not working for us? What do we need to work on in the second half? In other words, Socratic questions was all he did at halftime.
But the coolest question is, what's working for them? What do we have to stop? She was a different player.
So were her teammates. So there is this tendency in even really good programs in schools to not help kids gain proactive control of the situation and have a long term view. Simple test-- all of you are teaching now.
Ask kids to self-assess right now-- now's a good time, January-- against your goals for the year. What is her goal for the year? I mean, that's what's going to happen.
And they're going to cherry pick some random little things, and you're going to be depressed. But that's a good experience. That's a really good experience.
It's the kid who has the meet the goals. It's the kid that has to understand via transparency and reinforcement the long-term goals. So critical and creative thinking, to go back to our example, is a goal, then that should be so obvious that the kids will self-assess against critical and creative thinking.
Let's try it as a quick and dirty exercise. Think. Pair.
Share. If you had to write a one-sentence mission statement for your course, what would it be? Jot some thoughts, try it out on the person next to you.
One-sentence mission statement. What is the point of my course? And I'm using the word course to cover everything from pre-K to graduate school, from soccer to physics.
If you are an elementary person, you could think of course in either one of two ways. You could say what's the point of what I do with first graders, or what's the point of the language arts strand? Or the social studies strand.
So you can go either way since you have so many duties. Let me ask you to pause for a minute and let's do a little bit of backward design thinking, Then this is the basic logic of backward design. We'll say more about it later, and many of you know this.
If that's the goal, what follows? If that's the long-term goal, what follows? What follows for assessment?
What follows for instruction? Go back to your conversations and just together play out casually and informally, at this point, the answers to those questions as they occur to you. If that's the goal, what should we be assessing?
And by assessing, I do not mean grading, I mean assessing just like you would do as a soccer coach. You don't give a grade as a varsity-- well, maybe in some schools you do. I never did.
But you're assessing, you're judging how we're doing against the goal, you're coaching, you're giving information about how we're doing against the goal. So what should we assess? And what should we be doing instructionally?
Or, what should occur in the classroom? And let me tell you one quick story before we do it. When I asked this question, and a fourth-grade teacher pulled me over and she said, well, there's two parts to my answer.
I want students to be good readers, but more importantly, I want them to love to read. I said, let's just focus on the love to read. We know something about how to make good readers, but focus for me on love to read.
What would be evidence that they love to read? And what do you have to do instructionally to make it more likely that they love to read? And I said, be careful.
Requiring them to do everything isn't likely to cause it, in fact, it may undercut it. We know this about boys. So, that's the caution.
If that's your goal, what's the assessment? What needs to happen instructionally to support and head toward your goal? Somebody go first, do it together, and somebody go second, do it together.
5, 10 minutes.
