Midterm Project for EDUC 410

1. UNDERSTANDING
Chelsea Baker

2. WHAT IS UNDERSTANDING
Understanding is…
 The ability to infer hidden meanings.
 The ability to read between the lines.
 The ability to apply concepts to new and different
situations and concepts.
 Understandings differ from knowledge
 Knowledge is specific to facts, information, and
skills.
 Understandings are more abstract and require a
deeper level of knowledge.

3. WHAT ARE UNDERSTANDINGS
Understandings are…
 Conceptual
 Transferable
 Comprehensive
 Abstract
 Developed by uncovering and doing
Understandings are not…
 Recalling information
 Written facts
 Immediately understood

4. BACKWARDS DESIGN
Backwards design is an approach to
understanding.
Allows us to begin planning by thinking
about the life long understandings we want
students to take away.

5. STAGE 1

6. ESTABLISHED GOALS - STANDARDS
Common Core
 State standards
 Literacy, science, social studies, 21 st century skills
 Starting point for each lesson
 What lesson is formed around
NCSSS
 National Curriculum Standards for Social Studies
 Specific to Social studies
 Introduces themes within social studies

7. ESTABLISHED GOALS - STANDARDS
 NCSSS Themes
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Culture
Time, continuity, and change
People, places, and environments
Individual development and identity
Individuals, groups, and institutions
Power, authority, and governance
Production, distribution, and consumption
Science, technology, and society
Global connections
Civic ideals and practices

8. TRANSFER GOALS
 Transfer goals build off of the big ideas within a unit
and apply them to transferable tasks.
 Blooms taxonomy poses many meaningful tasks to
help guide students in building understandings.

9. TRANSFER GOALS - BLOOMS TAXONOMY
EXAMPLES
 Creating
 Students will be able to create a brochure about eating healthy.
 Evaluating
 Students will be able to assess their peers presentation in a
respectful manner.
 Analyze
 Students will be able to compare and contrast healthy and unhealthy
foods.
 Apply
 Students will be able to classify animate and inanimate objects.
 Remember
 Students will be able to describe the characters in a story using key
details.
 Understand
 Students will be able to explain the stages of mitosis.

10. BLOOMS TAXONOMY VERBS

11. TRANSFER GOALS – NON EXAMPLES
Ineffective transfer goals
 Students will be able to…
 Recall what culture is.
 Define culture.

12. MEANING MAKING
 Understandings
 This section is where we state the concepts that students will
understand by the end of the lesson.
 The understandings are based off of the activities that students
complete during the lesson.
 This section allows us to evaluate the tasks that we are having
students perform and how effective they will be for student
understanding.
 The understandings should be narrowed down to specific concepts
within the standards.
 Examples:
 In a lesson on culture we would want students to understand:
 Culture is the behaviors, beliefs, traditions, and ways of living in a specific
group of people.
 Similarities and differences between cultures.
 Non Examples:
 What culture is

13. MEANING MAKING
 Essential Questions
 Essential questions are thick and descriptive questions.
 They help to guide students thinking towards the important concepts
in the lesson.
 Essential questions get students thinking about the concepts in ways
that they may not have already been thinking.
 Examples:
 How are groups of people alike and different?
 How does culture link a group of people?
 Non Examples:
 What is culture?
 Why is culture important?

14. ACQUISITION OF KNOWLEDGE AND SKILL
 Knowledge
 The knowledge section pertains to the information that students will
gain during the lesson.
 It can also pertain to the knowledge that students will already have.
 Examples:
 Students will know…
 Important people who impacted the U.S. throughout history.
 How to define culture and bias.

15. ACQUISITION OF KNOWLEDGE AND SKILL
 Skills
 The skills sections is where you would put the skills that students will
need to have in order to complete the tasks.
 If students do not already have these skills then you will need to help
the students gain these skills.
 The skills section can also be where you would put the skills that
students will learn within in the lesson.
 Examples:
 Students will be skilled at…
 Collecting information from various forms of media.
 Using maps and globes to find locations of countries.

16. PERSONAL MISCONCEPTIONS
 Knowledge and skill
 At first I thought that the knowledge and skill sections were only for
the knowledge and skills that students will gain from the lesson.
However I realized that this can also be a place to put knowledge and
skills students will need in order to participate and engage in the
lesson.
 Essential questions
 When I first began working with the essential questions I thought
that they were just questions that you would ask during the lesson.
However, I learned that these questions are actually there to help
assist students in their thinking process. They help students to build
meaningful understandings and allow them to keep considering the
concepts even after the lesson is over.

17. PERSONAL MISCONCEPTIONS
 Standards
 My biggest struggle with building a lesson is pairing standards. The
standards are the most important pieces in building a meaningful
lesson. There were many times that I thought standards would pair
well together until I began working with those standards. It was then
that I would realize that the concepts within the standards were to
broad and needed to be narrowed down.

18. RESOURCES
 Adler, S. A . (2010). National curriculum standards for social
studies: a framework for teaching, learning and assessment .
Silver Spring, Md: National Council for the Social Studies.
 Wiggins, G., & McTighe, J. (2005). Understanding by
Design, Expanded 2nd Edition (2nd ed.). Alexandria: ASCD .