Dear Teachers,

Understanding by Design is a framework that can help the English Department reverse their “marching through the standards” attitude. We want our students to have an enduring education in which they will use these knowledge and skills as adults. This starts with discerning what the big ideas are and prioritizing our teaching around those big ideas. We should only choose standards that lead up to those big ideas.

This strategy is called backwards design. This allows you to begin with the end in mind. Even this can be a daunting task, so we can choose one unit per quarter, and decide on ways that we can enhance it through design process. Within that process, we need to foresee problems that students might face, and collaborate to find out ways to account for those challenging times.

There are a labyrinth of standards that teachers are required to be covered in the English Language Arts Common Core State Standards. As the department chair of the English Department, many new teachers will ask me, “But how do you know which ones are the most important?” It can be a daunting task to sift through the most essential standards we want to teach. Sometimes, leadership will suggest that we teach in a certain direction – “teach to the test.” But overall, we need to evaluate which standards are essential “life skills” for our students. What do we want our students to remember 2, 5, or even 10 years after they have been in our class?

A great way to spark a conversation is to ask my colleagues to think about the following questions.

1. ) What do you remember learning at the elementary, middle, and high school level?
2. ) What concepts and skills do you still apply in your everyday life?
3. ) Which teachers did you connect with and what did you learn from them?

This is what my visionary plan for next 2019 school year for my English Department data teams:

1. 1. Decide– As a department, we must first consider what standards are essential to teach. Since we teach 7th grade we are held accountable to the Common Core State Standards. As a department decide which standards are essential, “life skills.”
   2. Plan– We will use this UbD Template, to revisit and re-do 2 lessons that we enjoy teaching. Stage 3 of the template can be completed by each individual teacher, because everyone’s style of teaching is different.
   3. Execute– Carry out the lesson in our classroom at the same time period of the quarter. I want to challenge teachers to email the department about their feedback regarding implementation of the lesson. Hopefully this will help the department become more collaborative. In an email, I want them to answer: What challenges they faced while implemented the lesson? How did the kids react to a certain part of the lesson? Did you noticed any critical errors in the UbD template that we need to fix ASAP?
   4. Debrief– At the faculty meeting we will revisit our completed UbD template. We will evaluate the quality of our essential questions. Did we ask the right questions? Also, it is important to look at the performance task. Are our artifacts aligned with our essential questions?
   5. Revise– The most important aspect of teaching is reflecting and learning from your mistakes. When the unit is over, we should continually revise the UbD template so that newer English teachers have a blueprint coming into the new school year. Also, when we carry out the lesson again, we can learn from our mistakes!

Mahalo,

Lani