Chapter 8

As soon as I find my UbD book or the reflection or borrow one, this will be done. And I mean today too, just not this minute...

Chapter 10

This chapter discussed moving forward to integrate UbD and DI. It expressed how the best place to start is by really figuring out our desired results and finding that "big idea." This is found in stage one, which, focuses on engaging student interest in school and creating higher quality and meaningful work for each student. Stage two discussed the teachers job. It is important for them to decided how they are going to assess each student and cater to their learning styles. It also emphasized the culmination of knowledge in a project or activity. Stage three is when the teacher thinks bout how to get their students to the chosen goal. It reminds the teacher to pay attention to goals and methods of assessment, because those can make or break the learner. The chapter also discussed different methods and practices for teachers. One of which was finding a parter to work and plan lessons with. This way the students wil be learning two different subjects in two different classrooms. The overall main idea of the chapter was to keep the desired results in sight.


We all liked how this chapter summarized the major points of the book. It outlined what we have been doing in class this semester. One helpful idea was the suggestion to take this book and share it with others. Teaching should be a team based effort. We know when we are in our own classrooms we will use differentiated instruction because it really helps students learn more.

DI and UbD Chapter 7

This chapters emphasis is on "uncovering" the material; that is to truly go over it in depth and ensure that the students have full understandings about a subject before the instructor moves on. The emphasis about correlation and causation in the very beginning sums it up nicely.
Instructors can ensure that the material is properly uncovered by asking themselves essential questions about the lesson they planned. The essential questions themselves are the ones asked at the very first stage of backwards design. To bring the students closer to the essential questions, other open ended thought provoking questions are answered. The ones with answers that change depending on who answers them are always the best.
The Six facets of Understanding serve may serve as both indicators for understanding and as possible "hooks" You always have to hook students. In dealing with these complex understandings it is important to remember that basic skills will be picked up as the students find themselves engaging in the more advanced lessons.
Lastly and most importantly we have the WHERETO framework which pulls everything together into a general outline of a lesson. If the instructor follows the WHERETO formula it will mean a great difference in the ability of the students to learn the material and ease the teachers task of teaching it.


All of us connected he reading with what we are currently doing now in Stage 2 with the WHERETO format. We all see how the format allows us to effectively plan and implement those plans as future teachers. A few of us noted that the ladder system that was disparaged (rightly so in many cases) in the text does seem to have a few uses though, especially when basics are absolutely essential to the discipline. I argue math is one of those categories. If one has a shaky algebra base, one is going to find oneself in trouble come trigonometry. I can vouch for this with personal experience. I believe that for other concepts such as social science, the basics can be learned from advanced work. Same thing with English. I'm a decent writer when I wish, and it isn't because I spent hours going over vocab and grammar, but because I spent hours reading books. As teachers, if we can find an application that teaches the students both basic skills and advanced skills at the same time, we should most definitely utilize that application to its full potential. Technology already produces some of those applications (blogging) and I imagine that more will be produced as time goes on. And every time something new comes out, we as teachers need to say to ourselves (and others) "How can we use this?"

Chapter 9

This chapter is both a summary of much of the material to this point as well as more information about working with and perfecting differentiation in the classroom. Looking rather specifically at a health example, the chapter looks at how an entire unit looks when done with backwards design. It comes down to really making the enitre process, including the environment and curriculum, entirely about the benefit of the student. The better we do of this the more signs we'll see in assessment and overall student attitude.
We all found this chapter to be very helpful, not so much in content as in it helped tie a lot of stuff together. I think that its more of how its written that I feel will help us progress in our teaching. As Dr. Grace pointed out in class, when we start teaching we're going to really have a lot to do in our first few months and sometimes slowing down and really thinking about what we need to do and what has been done will be really good in helping us get the important materials across to the students. Finding the "big picture" is so very important to proper planning.

DI UbD Chapter 5

The entire chapter covers accurate testing techniques that properly assess the capabilities of the student being tested. The three key principles to assessment are as follows: Does the assessment cover a broad concept, or a fine detail of the concept? Do the measures match the goals of the test? And the last is whether or not the form of the test serves its own function. The chapter also detailed the GRASPS frame which provides a frame for more detailed and effective/efficient learning. Grasp stand for Goal, Role, Audience, Situation, Products, Standards.
The chapter also discusses pre-assessment and how it should be used by the teacher to understand what the students already have learned and how the lesson or unit should be tailored to suit their needs.


This approach conflicts with the current test crazy system that we have in place; both instituted by colleges and the federal government. It is rather difficult to implement teaching styles when an all important test is looming over the heads of teachers and students alike.
This chapter also connected with the six facets of learning that were introduced in "Fair isn't Always Equal in chapter 2, and reminded teachers that giving work back to students quickly is very important. Every student has stories about teachers that weren't quick to give back important work.
Lastly, this chapter really emphasises how every assignment should have a goal and a purpose, thus eliminating busy work. Everything done in class is one more step along the path to a higher goal.

Chapter 6

Having a lesson plan designed to differentiate when necessary and assist the students in learning whenever possible is fantastic, would make educations far better all over the world, if they are carried out correctly of course. Being able to effectively deliver lessons is key to students mastering a concept. Some nice tactics to remember are sharing the overall goals with the students regularly, this allows the students to see the relevance of the lesson. Also its nice to work with other teachers to plan class runnings for optimized student performance.

This chapter was a great help in that we're all working at developing plans for lessons and it gave a few ideas to prepare for actually teaching the lessons we prepare to teach them. We should always keep in mind as students/teachers, our educations are continuing and we always need to be ready to adapt and improve.

Chapter 3 Synthesis

Abstract:
The primary focus of this chapter was upon the introduction of a technique called backwards design. This technique was developed to address a specific issue. The issue was that teachers often have lots of information to present and not enough time to present it in. Backwards design helps focus the information in a form that can be delivered with alacrity without sacrificing content.

Reflections: Everyone was able to relate this chapter to their own lives, usually as examples in which they participated or created an activity that went nowhere. Backwards design provides organization to an activity something everyone appreciates. Some of us even remember activities that weren’t just unorganized, but seemed downright pointless. Using the Backwards design technique, teachers should be able to make their lessons more meaningful for their students, something they will undoubtedly appreciate.

Chapter 2 Synthesis

Synthesis of Chapter 2 DI/UD

Synopsis:

This chapter discussed successful teaching and how it is extremely important for the material being taught to relate to students in some way. The chapter discusses several different ways in which the material can be tailored to the students learning aptitudes and how to teach responsively. Teaching responsively allows the teacher to respond appropriately to the different needs of different students. Among the most effective ways to teach responsively would be the use of group activities.

Connections and Reflections:

Readers were both reassured, and in agreement with the text. All of the readers were glad that successful teaching does require a certain amount of personal involvement in the class. A few noted some of the quotes that they liked including “teaching is an art that calls on its practitioners to work simultaneously in multiple media, with multiple elements”. Everyone agreed that finding new ways to relate to the students helps the students and the teachers.

Chapter 4

This chapter heavily emphasizes instructional strategies inside a curriculum and offers numerous scenarios to illustrate the points. It is about what we, as teachers, need to think about when planning lessons. In planning for the class, differentiation is important but can also cause more problems if not handled correctly. In differentiating, you don’t want to give the struggling students less work and the achieving students more work. We need to be effective and pay attention to the quality of how we teach. It is important for a teacher to hold a powerful curriculum, but to remember that they are teaching students, so it is important to make sure their curriculum caters to all their students. They need to focus on the students’ knowledge, understanding, and skill and focus their curriculum around that. When every student is able to learn it makes it easier for the teacher to communicate with the classroom. By changing the work, but keeping it in the structure and heading towards a desired goal, struggling students can learn the skills they need to comprehend the overall ideas. To achieve a successful class, we need to establish clarity, accept responsibility, develop respect, build awareness, develop classroom management routines, help students become effective partners, develop flexible routines, expand a collection of instructional strategies, and reflect on individual progress. It is also important for the teacher to teach each student as an equal and not let gender or race interfere. This means the teacher needs to get to know each student and follow his or her progress. It is important for the teacher to always have an image of what their classroom should ideally look like, and they should always hold high expectations for every element of the classroom.

We connected to the reading because it helped us realize that this information is what we need to keep in mind when planning our lessons. We need to keep in mind that while some students struggle through the lessons, others may get bored at the same time. This is something we related to, remembering, that in many classes some of us felt bored and not challenged. This led to us doing poorly in class because we wouldn’t apply ourselves. It is important to pay attention to both ends of the classroom (those who struggle and those who are ahead), as to not have this problem. Some of us also felt the teacher didn’t do enough to help us learn. Classes filled with ‘busy work’ often led to us not wanting to apply ourselves. This is also something a teacher needs to avoid. We were lucky, though, to have teachers that did do a lot for us and put a lot of work into their lessons. Some felt, however, that this chapter might have gotten a little repetitive at times. Despite the different examples for different subjects the main theme was always the same: diversify the curriculum to accommodate different students. What was more important were the various techniques, because as the text noted, nearly all teachers understand the value of a varied curriculum; however few actually are able to successfully introduce said curriculum into their classroom. The recommendation that the teacher allow for the students to take learning into their own hands is a good idea; a great deal can be learned from a self-driven project, and while some schools frown on independent projects. It will be difficult to try and incorporate all of these qualities into our lessons at first, but we should be able to get better at it over time.

Integrating Chapter 1

This chapter discussed the importance of Differentiated Instruction and Understanding by Design. Each of these instructions are seen as going side by side. Differentiated instruction focuses on the students, the classroom, and our methods of teaching. The goal of Differentiated Instruction is to ensure that teachers focus on methods that are effective for the students. It is important to have a quality curriculum that depends students’ understandings, so that they are able to apply it to the outside world. Using axioms, several examples were given to demonstrate different approaches of these methods.

We all connected to the reading through the axioms and corollaries. They helped us gain tips and ideas to use in the classroom. One, for instance, is to have students come up with their own questions about how the curriculum affects them. This will help them remember the material more because it would be something they were interested in. The chapter said one important aspect of a quality curriculum was a lesson that would help the student relate the material learned to the outside world, which was something we related to. We feel that in general we can learn a lot from this book, but it might be hard reaching different types of learners (like those you would see in AP level courses), with “standard” styles of teaching.