The Understanding by Design Handbook

McTighe, J. & Wiggins, G. (1999). The understanding by design handbook. Alexandria, Virginia: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

Summary

Once you have a basic understanding of the Understanding By Design method, this book really helps with the design and implementation of the method.  The book begins with an overview of the key concepts to UBD, then provides worksheets, models and examples to guide a teacher through the process.  There is a chapter to help teachers extract enduring understandings from the standards--recognizing that there is just too much to teach if we try to include every single standards.  Then the next chapters help with: identifying evidence of understanding, turning understandings into performances, designing a performance task, and designing a rubric.  That is followed by materials to plan the learning experiences needed to gain the understandings. The authors, in the introduction, said this handbook was necessary because they saw that teachers were still struggling after reading the introductory book to UBD, and they even saw that some of what they told teachers to do in the original books just did not work in practice.

Analysis

This book is great because it is practical.  So many times as teachers were are expected to read the literature about best practices and then are left to figure out how to apply them on our own.  Having said that, even though UBD is considered good practice, so much so that the new Teacher Performance Expectations for California even mention a new teacher will use UBD as one of several strategies in the classroom, it is hard to find current examples of its use.  There used to be a website that had model lessons, but I went to the site and the items have been taken down.  Thus, it seems unlikely someone will use this book from beginning to end, but it will help you with learning how to write essential questions and with identifying those essential understandings your students should know.