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?"