Understanding by Design, Expanded Edition

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.

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.