Understanding by Design: Chaper 4

In this chapter the author gives you the essentials on how to the best teacher you can be.  It begins by stressing the fact that curriculum and instruction needs to be essential in providing students with the needed content and engaging the student in that content. It proceeds to talk about how preassessing your learners will provide you with the needed information about your class.  This will help you determine the students that will need more explanations than others.  In knowing this you will be able to keep each student engaged.  If you are teaching student’s information that they already know more likely they will become unengaged and bored with content.  The chapter provides you with examples in how to manage your students leaning.  Having multiple activities at different learning levels with different learning intelligences will be the best way to provide your students with enough challenges that hopefully will keep them interested in the topics. This will also help you as a teacher become more responsible for the student’s success in your class. If the students are learning the adequate information it’s not their fault as a teacher it is yours.  This may be caused by the lack of awareness for different learning styles and students multiple intelligences.  This chapter helps you in continually tracking your students with examples of different strategies.  This chapter was very helpful, it continually giving examples on how to do develop these certain skills which made the reader aware of what it will actually look like in the classroom.

                 

Multiple Intelligence: Chapter 4

In Chapter 4 the authors provide you examples of how you can teach MI in your classrooms. 

The first thing you want to do is to simply explain the theory to them.  You can alter your vocabulary so that all of the students understand what some of the different categories are.  Another helpful idea is to make a MI Pizza that is cut into 8 different slices with pictures and easy to understand words that describe each one. 

Different ways to teach MI Theory are:

• Career Day: Invite members of your community that represent the different intelligences and see how the students interact with them.
• Field Trip: Try and take your kids to different places that bring out their naturally MI’s.
• Biographies: Have your student learn about different well-known people and how they use their different intelligence to exceed in their professions.
• Lesson Plans: For this you can have your students be aware that you are going to teach in all of the 8 intelligences and have them try and guess what activity went with each intelligence.
• Quick experimental activities: Find different ways in which the students can response quickly in each intelligence.
• Wall Displays: Try and find posters of 8 people who succeed in the array of intelligences.
• Displays: Show products made by students that show examples of the intelligences
• Readings: Provide students with readings on MI
• MI Tables: Provide 8 different areas in which students can go to use that specific intelligence.
• MI stories, songs or play: You can create different stories, songs or plays with the help of your students to portray the intelligences in different ways.

Mutiple Intelligence: Chapter 3

Chapter 3 of MI describes how you can assess the different multiple intelligences of your students. The first thing you need to know is how students with the different intelligences think.

Different learning styles	Ways in which learners think
Linguistic	In words
Spatial	In images and pictures
Bodily-Kinesthetic	Through somatic sensations
Musical	Via rhythms and melodies
Interpersonal	By bouncing ideas offer other people
Intrapersonal	In relation to their needs, feelings, and goals
Naturalist	Through nature and natural forms
Logical-Mathematical	By reason

There are many ways in which you can asses your students but the best way is to simply observe them.  In the chapter the authors provide a checklist that you could perform on each student, which will make it easier for you to determine their primary learning strategy.  This will become useful when making lessons plans so that you can tailor the assignments that will promote the best work from your students.  Other examples of assessment are:

• Collecting Documents: pictures and videos can be used to capture memorable
• Looking at student records: typically which subjects were better/worse
• Talking with other teachers:  This will help in assessing the student as a whole, maybe they engage more/less in other subject areas, or even with different teaching strategies.
• Talking with student’s parents: This will help provide more information about the child through their actions outside of the classroom (different hobbies and interests).
• Ask students: feedback from students will tell you a lot.
• Set up special activities: Look for those kids who are striving and those that aren’t.

The importance of knowing your students different learning styles is essential and will help you teach in ways that your students will understand and maybe even engage in the material more enthusiastically. 

Understanding By Design: Chapter 3

In chapter 3 the authors talk about how stressful it can be to manage the amount of material that you want to cover in a class and the amount of time in which you have to teach it.  To try and help with this issue subject content standards were introduced. For many teachers this helped guided their curriculums but it also put more pressure for teachers to get through this certain material.   The chapter continues with giving you an example of a “three-stage backwards design process for curriculum planning”(27).

• Stage 1- Identify desired results-(clarity about priorities)
• Stage 2-Determine acceptable evidence (assessments regarding the targeted learning)
• Stage 3- Plan learning experiences and instruction (engaging and effective for learners)

This chapter also offers a template for organizing a backward design which seems very interactive, I also found the WHERETO acronym for organizing a learning plan very efficient and easy to remember.

• W- Where the unit is going and What is expected
• H-Hook the students and Hold their interest
• E- Equip students, help them Experience key ideas and Explore the issue
• R- Provide opportunities to Rethink and Revise their understanding
• E-Evaluate students work
• T- Tailor to needs of all the students
• O- Be Organized

The chapter also helps in the understanding of the standards at which you are trying to meet.  The helpful hint that the authors proposed was to analyze the standards and for the different nouns that were used look at those as the “big ideas” and the verbs are simply the assessments that are suggested.

Understanding by Design: Chapter 2

The beginning of chapter two starts out with provided us to the centrals of teaching.  The main focus’ as teachers is “what we ought to teach-what we want students to know, understand, and be able to do.  Another important focus that we need to remember is whom we are teaching.  We need to remember that students although alike in many ways, are all different.  The main idea of this chapter is to learn about the variance of students.   They proceed to explain different situations in which kids vary in the meaning behind certain actions.  The overall explanation is that not all of your kids are going to be trying to find the ins and outs of math or reading, but to try and find themselves and where they belong.  For most kids the importance of a teaching is not only to teach them the different subjects but always be an individual that they think cares about them and their abilities.  The end of the chapter gives you examples on how the teacher can connect to all of their students without making it seem that way.  Some examples are building positive relationships with your students, positive climate in the classroom matters, how “interest ignites motivation to learn, and many more.  Differentiation is also mentioned in the later part of the chapter with examples of how teachers can provide variance in teaching.  They book mentions how it’s important to get to know your students, having them engage in group sharing and readings, engaging students in challenges, having them be able to express ideas individual to each student, providing assessments that are not necessarily graded, varying expressions in which you teach and many more.  The importance of incorporating all these ideas in your curriculum design is essential to communications “to real human beings in the power of knowledge”.

Understanding by Design: Chapter 1

In chapter one of Integrating Differentiated Instruction and Understanding by Design by Carol Ann Tomlinson and Joy McTighe the authors give you a brief introduction on what Understanding by Design and Differentiated Instruction’s are and how and they are part of many classes today.  The book states that the primary goal of Understanding by Design is “delineating and guiding application od sound principles of curriculum design” The main focus for Understanding by Design is “what we teach and what assessment evidence we need to collect” (pg 2). Whereas Differentiated Instruction’s main focus is “whom we teach, where we teach, and how we teach” and the primary goal is” ensuring that teachers focus on processes and procedures that ensure effective learning for varied individual” (pg 3).  The chapter explains what Axioms and Corollaries are and how the interact with UbD and DI’s way of teaching.  The axioms are associated with Understanding by Design and the corollaries with Differentiated experience. The end of the chapter gives you scenarios that make it very easy to understand the different axioms and corollaries of teaching. 

I personally liked how this chapter was set up.  I like how it presented the information, first by explaining the what and then explaining how to incorporate all of it together. The way that different axioms and corollaries were worded was hard for me to understand.  Although the scenarios that went along with those made it much clearer as to what the certain axions and corollaries really were and how to incorporate them into a classroom setting. 

Multiple Intelligence: Chapter 2

The developing of different intelligences is determined by 3 factors:

• Biological endowment: including hereditary or genetic factors and insults or injuries to the brain before, during, and after birth.
• Personal life history- including experiences with the parents, teachers, peers, friends, and others who awaken intelligences, keep them from developing, or actively repress them.
• Cultural and historical background- including the time and place in which you were born and raised and the nature and state of cultural or historical developments in different domains.

There are also different experiences that either “paralyze” our intelligence or crystialize them.  They are sought to be the turning point or the light bulb in which a child either develops that intelligence more or in the sad circumstances diminishes the will to learn more about the intelligence. In conjuction with those they are different factors that will help facilitate these actions. They include:

• Access to resources or mentors
• Historical-cultural factors
• Geographic factors
• Familial Factors
• Situational factors

This chapter makes you open your mind and makes you realize all of the different people that are in this world today.  These different intelligences need to be apparent in your daily curriculum so that you as a teacher are crystallizing these intelligences instead of paralyzing them.  The importance of teaching is getting the best out of everyone; yes it is important to build their knowledge in many different forms of intelligences but we need to understand that each child has their own way of learning material and also their own way of expressing that same material.