William Brannick's List: Understanding By Design

• Emphasizing the teacher's critical role as a designer of student learning, UbD works within the standards-driven curriculum to help teachers clarify learning goals, devise revealing assessments of student understanding, and craft effective and engaging learning activities.
• development and deepening of student understanding.
• Students reveal their understanding most effectively when they are provided with complex, authentic opportunities to explain, interpret, apply, shift perspective, empathize, and self-assess.
• Effective curriculum development reflects a three-stage design process called "backward design" that delays the planning of classroom activities until goals have been clarified and assessments designed. This process helps to avoid the twin problems of "textbook coverage" and "activity-oriented" teaching, in which no clear priorities and purposes are apparent.
• Teachers become most effective when they seek feedback from students and their peers and use that feedback to adjust approaches to design and teaching.
• More than 150 University education classes use the book as a text.
• Over 30,000 Handbooks are in use.
• Over twenty thousand educators have access to the UbD Exchange through individual, school, district or regional memberships

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• The mission of high school is not to cover content, but rather to help learners become thoughtful about, and productive with, content. It's not to help students get good at school, but rather to prepare them for the world beyond school—to enable them to apply what they have learned to issues and problems they will face in the future
• must reflect this central mission, which we call learning for understanding.
• Out-of-context learning of skills is arguably one of the greatest weaknesses of the secondary curriculum—the natural outgrowth of marching through the textbook instead of teaching with meaning and transfer in mind
• Direct instruction.
• Facilitation
• Coaching

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