What is understanding and how does it differ from knowledge? How can we determine the big ideas worth understanding? Why is understanding an important teaching goal, and how do we know when students have attained it? How can we create a rigorous and engaging curriculum that focuses on understanding and leads to improved student performance in today's high-stakes, standards-based environment? Authors Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe answer these and many other questions in this second edition of Understanding by Design. Drawing on feedback from thousands of educators around the world who have used the UbD framework since its introduction in 1998, the authors have greatly revised and expanded their original work to guide educators across the K-16 spectrum in the design of curriculum, assessment, and instruction. With an improved UbD Template at its core, the book explains the rationale of backward design and explores in greater depth the meaning of such key ideas as essential questions and transfer tasks. Readers will learn why the familiar coverage- and activity-based approaches to curriculum design fall short, and how a focus on the six facets of understanding can enrich student learning. With an expanded array of practical strategies, tools, and examples from all subject areas, the book demonstrates how the research-based principles of Understanding by Design apply to district frameworks as well as to individual units of curriculum. Combining provocative ideas, thoughtful analysis, and tested approaches, this new edition of Understanding by Design offers teacher-designers a clear path to the creation of curriculum that ensures better learning and a more stimulating experience for students and teachers alike.

Today's organizations demand a focus on higher-level objectives—objectives that clearly provide business impact and value and satisfy the expectations of a wide range of key stakeholders. If you're involved in implementing projects, programs, initiatives, or solutions in your organization, Beyond Learning Objectives can help you meet these new expectations. This book provides step-by-step processes for defining, measuring, and developing six types of objectives: input, reaction, learning, application, impact, and ROI. You'll also learn to avoid common pitfalls in the development of objectives, such as unclear, incomplete, nonspecific, or even missing objectives. And you'll learn how well crafted, results-driven objectives can satisfy the needs of all your stakeholders. With this book in your hands, you can become a champion of well-defined objectives, providing direction, focus, and guidance. By spelling out expectations, creating commitment, and positioning your initiatives for success, you'll help your organization align its programs with its results and leap forward into the state-of-the-art world of measurable performance.

Design and teach effective learning goals and objectives by following strategies based on the strongest research available. This book includes a summary of key research behind these classroom practices and shows how to implement them using step-by-step hands-on strategies. Short quizzes help readers assess their understanding of the instructional best practices explained in each section.

Learning Beyond the Objective in Primary Education explores an existential perspective for pedagogy proposed in response to the current technocratic paradigm of education prevalent in many countries worldwide. This new perspective is termed ‘Bildung’s Repetition.’ The book seeks to encourage policy makers and educational practitioners to consider the impact of education on children, over and above the meeting of set targets and objectives. Located in a philosophical framework, this book considers how children might learn authentically in the light of their own personal contingency. A series of case studies reflecting the effectiveness of this perspective through the curriculum is provided, each illustrating how ‘Bildung’s Repetition’ allows for personalized meaningful learning within current structures. Recommendations for practice are provided, encouraging all stakeholders in education to consider the value of this perspective, and effect a ‘ten-degree shift’ within educational thought. This unique book fuses theory with practice, and will be of great interest to academics, researchers and students in the fields of primary education and teacher training. It will also be of interest to school leaders and practicing teachers.

Helps educators to design assignments and rigorous rubrics that truly measure student learning objectives The ability of students to pass an examination does not necessarily reflect or guarantee their ability to apply knowledge in practice, nor are traditional exams a sufficient means to evaluate all learning objectives. Written for both new and seasoned nurse educators, this book is unique in its provision of rigorous rubrics that fully take into account learning objectives and the teachingñlearning process, and promote objective grading. It examines a variety of time-tested, alternative evaluation methods, discusses how to design them, and includes best practices for using them. The book provides an overview of how evaluation and rubrics play an integral part within the larger nursing education teachingñlearning process. It helps educators clearly define learning objectives and desired outcomes, and how to evaluate them. The book describes how to formulate a variety of teaching strategies, design effective assignments, and examine in detail specific evaluation methods including best practices for their use and exemplar analytic scoring rubrics. Also available are detailed, modifiable grading rubric templates for each assignment presented. Evaluation methods covered include papers, presentations, participation, discussion boards, concept maps, case studies, reflective journals, and portfolios. The book will assist both new and seasoned nurse educators in their quest to graduate competent, safe nurses at all levels of nursing education. Key Features: Provides rigorous, modifiable rubrics for learning objective grading Includes time-tested alternative evaluation methods Describes best practices for designing a variety of teachingñlearning evaluation tools Includes guidelines for writing clear assignment descriptions Discusses papers, presentations, concept maps, case studies, portfolios, and more

Beyond Free College outlines an audacious national agenda—consistent with, but far more comprehensive than, the current “free college” movement—that builds on the best of US higher education’s populist history such as the G.I. Bill and the community college transfer function. The authors align a wide constellation of higher education trends—online learning, prior learning assessment, competency-based learning, high school college-credit— with a rapidly shifting student transfer environment that privileges college credit as the pivotal educational catalyst to boost access and completion. The book’s agenda seeks greater productive investment in postsecondary education by privileging a single metric—lower-cost-per-degree-granted—as the animating driver of a transfer pathway that will fulfill the potential of its historical, progressive innovators. Beyond Free College’s goal is as simple as it is urgent: To galvanize higher education advocates in an effort to reorganize, reorient, and reignite the transfer function to serve the needs of a neotraditional student population that now constitutes the majority of college-goers in America; and in ways that advance completion, not just access to higher education.