UbD Chapter 6 Crafting Understanding

What are some of the rules that teachers should follow in designing or planning? This chapter gives us some help in crafting proposed understandings. Teachers should focus units on a small number of transferable big ideas. Next, it is best to state desired understandings int he following way: "Students will understand that..." The desired understanding should be expressed in clear terms and be as specific and insightful as possible. Four, there are two kinds of understandings. The topical understandings are unit specific, and the overarching understandings are broader. This chapter seemed to be a lot of repetition of some of the previous chapters on understanding. I started reading and became disengaged rather quickly. I did like the little graphic organizer on page 137 which would serve as a guide to forming those all important essential questions. I liked the fill in the blanks. I could see that for some units, it might be a little challenging to come up with essential questions, so this graphic organizer would be a good guide for me to use to help create essential questions. I also like the chart on page 131 that helped frame the differences between topical understanding and the overarching ones. This might be a chapter that I need to go back and reread at some point in the future. I was not as engaged in this chapter. I wish I had more to reflect on for now, but other than what I have written above nothing else comes to mind. Maybe during our one-on-one meetings, you could help me dig deeper into this chapter if it is necessary to grasp concepts that I overlooked here.