Effective teachers begin with thoughtful plans, designed to optimize the understanding, knowledge, and skill of all learners. They then develop instructional routines that will assist each student in growing as much as possible in expanding that knowledge, understanding, and skill. Differentiated Instruction guides teachers in teaching curriculum and adapting instruction to best meet the needs of each learner. This session will examine the important connections between the Understanding by Design and Differentiated Instruction models.

Understanding By Design and Differentiated Instruction: Partners in Classroom Success

Presenters: Grant Wiggins, Jay Mctighe and Carol Ann Tomlinson

JAY MCTIGHE: — I am Jay McTighe. I'm pleased to be with my colleagues Carol Tomlinson and Grant Wiggins. We appreciate your attendance at this late hour. We are going to take a minute to give an overview of our content process and get right into it.

As many of you know, one of the ideas of understanding by design is to frame content around questions, questions that we hope provoke inquiry, thinking and reflection and uncoverage. There are four key questions that are framing our content today, and they are on the screen. Because this session is being audio taped, we will read or paraphrase some of these for the benefit of those people driving in their cars on the freeway three months from now.

We are going to be starting by looking at what are the big ideas of both understanding by design and differentiated instruction and how do these work together to support quality learning and effective teaching for all students. We also will be sharing with you our responses to some frequently asked questions regarding understanding by design, differentiation, and their fusion. More specifically, the topics that we propose to address during our 90 minutes include these: We are going to start by looking at big ideas of the two respective frameworks and philosophies, and then taking a little more close look at backward design and its intersection with differentiation and vice-versa. We are going to be sharing some specific and practical examples of units of study designed backward, with understanding in mind, and look at ways in which we can enhance it through applying specific differentiation processes. We will share with you, in part throughout and then more formally toward the end, some practical guidelines for the integration of UBD and DI, and wrap up with some of the questions that Carol, Grant, and I routinely receive.

It would help us to do a little self-assessment, a little diagnostic assessment, of your experience level with these two approaches. And so if we could ask, by a show of hands, in just a moment. Let me briefly describe the self-assessment continuum. Starting with understanding by design, “novice” would characterize those of you who are not familiar with understanding by design and have not read the book or attended any introductory workshops.

“Intermediate” would describe those who have the book and know where it is and have done some reading and/or attendance at introductory workshops. You have some familiarity. “Advanced” would characterize those of you have been using understanding by design for some time. You are familiar with the facets of understanding. You use backward design regularly in your work. You are familiar with the understanding by design exchange Web site.

“Expert” would characterize those of you with the features of advanced but who teach university level courses on understanding by design or a member of the understanding by design cadre.

Let's go back and just get a show of hands, if you would not mind please. How many of you would characterize yourself as novice?

[A show of hands]

JAY MCTIGHE: Thank you.

Intermediate?

[A show of hands]

JAY MCTIGHE: Thank you.

Advanced?

[A show of hands]

JAY MCTIGHE: Thank you.

And expert?

[A show of hands]

JAY MCTIGHE: So we have the whole continuum here, and we appreciate your response. We will do the same thing for differentiation with the same general categories, starting with novice. Novice to the ideas of differentiation?

[A show of hands]

JAY MCTIGHE: Thank you.

Intermediate?

[A show of hands]

JAY MCTIGHE: Advanced?

[A show of hands]

JAY MCTIGHE: And expert?

[A show of hands]

JAY MCTIGHE: Once again, we have a whole range of experience on the continuum here. Even though our session is large and our time frame is relatively short, we wanted to try to keep this a bit interactive during our 90 minutes together. And one of the ways we propose to do that is through a little instructional technique known as the three-minute pause, something that many of you have experienced, no doubt.

What we are going to do is periodically pause our presentation and give you a chance, in small groups with people seated nearby, to process some of the ideas presented, share your thoughts, maybe raise questions or talk about how it applies to your work or how it strikes you.

To use this, I am going to invite you now to identify a couple of people seated nearby. Three, four people will work well for this. People who you can get along with for three minutes a stretch. Please introduce yourself to a group.

[Pause]

JAY MCTIGHE: Okay, that was not a full three minutes. That was a chance to identify a group with whom to converse and we will periodically pause and give you a chance to converse about some of the key points. The bell will be a signal to wrap up conversations in your three-minute pause groups.

We are going to take a look at the intersection of understanding by design and differentiated delivery of a quality curriculum. I am going to turn this over to Grant, who is going to begin with a look at big ideas of understanding by design.

GRANT WIGGINS: Good afternoon everyone. You can see we have a lot of clout at ASCD. They gave us the prime spot on Sunday here. Let me give a brief summary of the big ideas of understanding by design, as promised.

One of the things that I might say right at the start is there is an unfolding collaboration that will be more substantive over the years. There has been a sense that there is some writing here that should get done, and we have had lots of conversations back and forth between Carol, Jay and myself. And so, just so you know, this is not sort of a one-shot deal. We are hoping to pursue this affiliation extensively, and this is just the first of many. There is a natural affinity between the two, in short.

We ask you, as a designer, to identify the big ideas, to make sure that we do not just get stuck in the minutia. So, what are the big ideas of understanding by design? Well, probably one of the biggest ideas is what we have come to call backward design, with a little tongue in cheek. Worrying a lot about the assessment before thinking through the lesson plans. Worrying a lot about what the standards or the desired results imply for assessment and learning — backward design.

A focus on big ideas as opposed to just long lists of content or, to say it a different way, imagine a big concept web, with little bits of content cohering around intelligent big ideas for grouping and organizing, not only the teaching but the learner's understanding of what matters. One of the most exciting parts of understanding by design, taking advantage of the fascinating research over the last 25 years into student misunderstanding, many people have reported to us over the last few years that this idea of anticipating student misunderstanding before designing and teaching is one of the most powerful things that has ever happened for them.

I just got through two days in a pre-conference, where we were focusing on leading understanding on design. And many people had the same response in really thinking carefully about faculty misunderstandings about teaching learning assessment and understanding by design, and really thinking that through as a part of backward design. Hence, it is about uncoverage, not coverage. What lies beneath the surface? What are the big ideas? What are the important issues? What are the potential misunderstandings and helping students work through their uncoverage?

Thinking like an assessor means many things to us, but it is a key idea. It is a cornerstone of the design and teaching process. Not just thinking like an activity designer but an assessor of did they get out of the activity what I wanted them to. What is the evidence? Do I see evidence of understanding or misunderstanding? It is the search for feedback. It is the coaching mentality.

It is not, I taught it, so they must have got it, but, having taught it, do I have evidence that they got? How do I build more evidence in? How do I take stock of the evidence along the way so I do not get to the end of the unit before it is too late or get to the end of the year before it is too late? What we cynically call teach, test, hope for the best, which, unfortunately, is all too common.

As many of you know who have read the book, this sort of intellectual centerpiece of the idea is what we call the six facets of understanding. Ways of ensuring, in the search for the right evidence and in the design of the right instruction, that understanding is made the center and the evidence of understanding dominates the design of the assessments, not just factual or process recall.

And finally, that there is a set of design standards, one of which has to do with differentiation; hence, the natural link. That instead of saying, I designed it, so it must be valid, which I think is what we all unfortunately end up doing a good deal of the time, we say, no, it is just like students with writing papers and rubrics and anchors. We say, okay, here is my design; does it meet standards? Are the questions really essential? Is it really focused around big ideas? Is this a valid assessment of the proposed understanding? Design standards that I can use in self-assessment, but especially in peer review, which is a cornerstone of the procedures that we use to advance the work. Hence, the next screen.

One of the big ideas about the process of design and its improvement is that it is just like coaching, constant cycles of model, practice, feedback. One of the things that is so frustrating for novice designers is they are often not used to working in that environment of constantly trying stuff out, testing it, revising it, testing it, revising it, wanting to be done with it too soon, or thinking somehow that if you just internalize all these ideas really well you can produce a good design out of the hat. No, it is much more like writing. It is much more like any complicated activity, where you have to try it, get some distance on it, revise it.

Natural implication. Both the student and the teacher need opportunities to reflect, criticize, self-assess, adjust in their work. The process, therefore, is messy even though, as you will see, the design template is neat and clean. And that leads to a common understanding that many of you know of, that you should just fill in the boxes of the template and all will be well, and that you should fill them in in order. No, it is not like that at all. It is the analogy of the cook producing the original recipe from scratch and seeing the recipe in the cookbook.

The recipe in the cookbook is linear and chronologically done so you can do everything in the right way. But that is not how the cook came to the recipe. Indeed, many real cooks do not even bother to measure anything. They do it by taste. They do it by what is fresh. They mess around. They try alternate ways of doing it. And then sometimes somebody has to follow along, who works for the cookbook company, and make them measure it, and then redo it all in a neat form. The same thing here.

So, there is a clear organizing template, but a very complex process, with many door ways in. All that matters is that you end up meeting the design standards.

Why bother? This is hard work. The answer is, because everywhere we look, we see what we have cheekingly called the twin sins of typical design — cute activities that end up only as refrigerator art not as real learning, or aimless marching through the textbook, where the student has no sense of what matters and why they should learn it in the first place.

Interestingly enough, it is our claim that though these classrooms might look very different, the third grade apples unit where people are bobbing for apples and making papier-mâché apple things, or the high school classroom, where they are sitting in rows and listening to a lecture, you may say, well, those are very different problems. One is hands-on. One is not. Kids are active. There is difference of activity. No, we would argue it is the same problem. A failure in the design to be clear about the desired understandings that should emerge from the teaching and learning.

So, despite the fact that it looks the same, it looks different, it is the same problem. A failure to be clear about the learnings that should result and how the design gets you there, as opposed to throw some activity and content at the wall and hope some of it sticks. So, our mantra is it is not the teaching or the activity that causes the understanding. It is the student being asked, by design, to make sense of the activities. It is not enough to be hands-on. It has to be minds-on.

I made reference to the six facets of understanding. Here they are. These represent common sense dictionary definitions of how we use the term "understand." They also represent some similarity overlap to Bloom's taxonomy. But we think they provide something that is a little bit more useful in terms of this goal we have of focusing on understanding without having it slip through our grasp.

Many people have reported that whenever they use something like bloom’s taxonomy to look at a design of assessments and curricula that they do not see higher order stuff. They see lower order stuff, even though the designer claimed it was higher order. We have found that these six facets of understanding, when used in the design process and as part of peer review, avoid that problem.

So, the goal would be, and it links closely to differentiation, that you are going to ask the student to show their understanding and you are going to cause them to come to some understandings through use of one or more of these facets. And by their very nature, they permit — indeed, demand — differentiation.

So, it comes down to, in the way of designing the template that follows from this way of thinking, that there is a three-stage template. Stage one, identify and clarify the desired results, with a focus on understanding. Determine acceptable evidence. And then, and only then, really worry about the learning plan fully.

What tends to happen, in contrast, with those who end up with just cute activities or coverage, is that they jump too quickly to the learning and teaching moves that they are going to make without thinking through the core backward design question: What would count as evidence of meeting my goals? What is implied in the state standards for evidence? What is implied in saying, I want students to understand the causes and effects of the Civil War or to Kill A Mockingbird?

So, to really think through the kind of evidence that we will except. The kids are walking out the door and we want to be able to say, wow, we can see that they show us evidence that they really got something. To use Ralph Tyler's old language from 75 years ago, that you have caused a change in the learner. What is the change? What does is look like?

By forcing the assessment piece, you force yourself to get out of your egocentrism as a teacher and avoid the fallacy of I taught it so they must have got it, to saying, what will count as evidence of getting it? Am I getting that evidence? Let's take a look.

It is a focus on big ideas throughout the three stages of design. We worry that the assessments don't just ask for little bitty factlets. We make the facts organized around complex understandings, made manifest in complex performances, but you cannot do the performances without some knowledge and skill. So the two go together. We teach towards the performances. So, our mantra is, think like an assessor.

What is required at the heart of it is to take your goal and really think it through. What is implied by the goal for evidence? What is implied by the general demands in the evidence for the particulars of the assessment? We talk all the time about students being critical thinkers. What does that look like? What is evidence of critical thinking? In any mode of performance — writing, speaking, observation, looking, display -- what would count as evidence? That is the general question. The first one is in blue.

The second one is, okay, if that is what counts in general as evidence of critical thinking, then what particular kinds of test will we construct? If you do not do it this way, you end up with a lot of invalid assessments if you are not careful.

The same logic now by just focusing on the word "understanding." What particularly do you want students to understand about California state history or the life cycle, the water cycle? What particularly do you want them to take away as an insight?

Well, what counts as evidence of that insight? And here is the essence of careful backward planning. Too often we do not submit the design to the test of, well, we have the kids do this interesting museum exhibit. But wait a minute. Neat exhibit, but could the kid do the exhibit well without the understanding we desire? Yes, the kid could, so it is not a good design. It is that kind of self-assessment that we think through in this backward design process.

Many people, for instance, fall into the trap of assuming that right answers to their test questions means the student has understanding. But it is possible, for instance, in this simple example of arithmetic to get a number of questions right about addition and subtraction without a deep understanding of place value and what it means.

So, you have to think through the question slightly differently. What kind of approach to testing arithmetic and subtraction would reveal understanding or misunderstanding about place value? Very often that assessment requires a student to explain their answer and the patterns that are in the answer.

A final point about the basic ideas of understanding by design. Many of you who have read the book and many of you who have done early training with us wondered about the focus on units. Well, the unit is a building block. And we began there because it is a better place for practicing educators to work. You can get to the nitty-gritty and avoid the vagueness and ambiguity of many of the outcome statements, movements of the eighties and nineties.

But, in fact, logically speaking, it makes sense to nest units in an overarching structure. Here is a simple example in U.S. history, where individual unit questions are nested in some overarching questions. Now, imagine a district where we agree at the department level and at the program level on some of those overarching elements. The things that lend themselves to differentiation among the faculty and among the courses, so that different takes on these larger questions can be done by individual teachers and entire programs.

So that in the larger world that had become totally transformed in a UBD way, you would see a curriculum mapping process and a curriculum design process in which the overarching assessment tasks, rubrics, essential questions, and core understandings would be mapped out into which individual designs can fit. Those of you have used the understanding by design exchange know that you can do that.

The district identifies some questions as you work on a unit that bears on that question, the question shows up, and you can choose to address it at that moment or not. So, that is the vision. It is a vision of a place in which units make up courses and programs in which the differentiation possibilities are a function of having the right design elements in place; namely essential questions, complex assessment needs, and such.

With that, I will turn it over to Carol for a shift of perspective into the differentiation piece per se.

CAROL ANN TOMLINSON: There are a number of ways, of course, that we can look at the idea of differentiation. But if you wanted to sort of trace a line of logic, we begin in differentiation with the premise that kids in the classroom differ. They differ in how they learn, what they care about learning, what they bring to the learning experience, and speed of learning. To learn well, we believe kids need to be challenged. But what is challenging for one student may not be for another.

Every child, in addition to challenge, needs success. And one of the problems with a classroom that is not differentiated is somebody is challenged and has a chance to succeed, but somebody is under-challenged and succeeds without challenge, and someone else is over-challenged and does not have the opportunity for success.

We believe also that part of differentiation has to do with how kids feel about themselves in the learning environment. Each student needs to feel connected to the people that he or she learns with, to the teacher, to the subject matter, to the endeavor of education. And learning needs to fit the student.

We have ample evidence from the last 200 years that if we ignore student differences we do not achieve challenge, success, connection, and fit. And so a major premise of differentiation is that it is really very important to figure out where the student is coming from at the same time you are figuring out what is really important in the curriculum.

Our assumption is that differentiation is really a lot about flexibility. When you achieve an understanding of solid curriculum, such as the kind of curriculum that emanates from good work with understanding by design, the challenge of differentiation becomes much less. In many ways, when you have really solid, rich curriculum to work from, tweaking it and changing it for kids is far, far simpler than when that is missing. But, nonetheless, flexibility is required.

Jay and Grant talk about the need to make sure that the assessment really matches the goals. But it is possible that the assessment may not match the learner's ability to explain or describe what they know. And so the question becomes, do I need to manipulate the assessment in anyway so that the student has maximum opportunity to show what he or she knows even though the assessment is tightly aligned to the learning goals?

Attention to student differences, if it is to succeed, has to be routed in solid curriculum. And that, of course, is the juxtaposition of differentiation and UBD, and we will look at that some more later. To talk about differentiation and disregard the quality of what you are differentiating is likely to be largely a waste of time.

And so, in some ways, what Jay and Grant are doing and what those of us who work with differentiation are doing is looking at the engine and the caboose, or the front and back of the horse and buggy. The two really have to pull and go together. And the notion of differentiation that is not immersed in a conversation about high-quality curriculum is far less likely to be worth the energy of the teachers.

Effective attention to student differences requires our understanding of a number of elements in a classroom. We really have to have respect in a classroom for each other. Right now competitive classrooms do not necessarily give us that. We have winners and losers. We have kids who are guaranteed hope and kids who are guaranteed no hope. We have students whose cultures are represented in the curriculum regularly and kids who never see their culture represented in the curriculum. To understand kids and to appreciate them is to try to build an environment of mutual respect, where everybody sees the promise in each other.

A classroom has to be safe. Even if you have rich curriculum, if I feel unsafe because my questions outstrip the curriculum and people get frustrated when I ask those questions, or if I feel unsafe because I did not understand what happened yesterday and I need another way to come at it, then safety is compromised.

A good differentiated classroom looks at individual growth. It would be a lovely thing, I suppose, although maybe boring, if Lake Woebegone were a reality instead of a radio show. But the truth of the matter is that I cannot necessarily learn everything at the same speed as the student next to me. And so, to some degree, as a teacher, you will be most effective if you can get me really excited about investing the most that I can, to grow the most that I can, and to get the student next to me to be maximally invested in his or her maximum growth.

The truth is that in life that is all people can ask of us is that what try as hard as we can to be the best that we can be. And the assumption in a differentiated classroom is, if you work as hard as you can and grow toward becoming the best that you can be, there should be some measure of success in that. And if you fail to do that, then the success is compromised and the results ought to show that.

Teachers and kids in differentiated classrooms have to share responsibility for learning so that teachers are asking kids important questions about their learning. What is working? What is not working?

As Grant just mentioned, so that we are using the assessments to really look at evidence. Not that the class learns something. Not that everyone in the class now knows this because four students made A's, but to really understand who is where based on that assessment and what we need to do to modify the instruction in the next step. And the next step might then become two steps. In the master plan, I may think the next lesson is X. But after I look at the assessment, it may have to be X and Y to be able to meet the need of particular students.

There are some principles of differentiation that I will mention to you in just a minute, but whatever we do in a differentiated classroom really exists to accomplish three things. One is to ensure high-quality curriculum, and that is the role of UBD, maximum individual growth, and a sense of community. And in some ways I suppose I could say that the role of UBD is high-quality curriculum. The more exclusive role of differentiation is a sense of community. And the shared role is maximum individual growth based on solid curriculum.

There are lots of different ways to achieve high-quality curriculum that is taught in responsive ways. And that is a very nice thing because, in some ways, what it means is it honors the creativity of the teacher, the particular development of the teacher, and the creativity of kids. In other words, when I look at the curriculum that Jay and Grant have created with teachers across the country using UBD, I am really fascinated by different ways that teachers come at the same content. But the goals are still clear. The teachers' creativity is allowed to thrive in there. And in a differentiated classroom, we are trying to do the same thing to honor the students' creativity.

So, if we look at sort of a flow of differentiation, when a teacher is really trying systematically class after class, day after day, to understand and respond to a learner's needs, differentiation is in process in some way. Trying to reach out to students to understand that they differ, to understand how they differ, to think about what I can do about that, is movement toward differentiation.

There are key principles that support differentiation. It does not work very well in a classroom to give kids different opportunities to learn if some of the tasks always look favored and others always look boring. It does not respond to what we know educationally if we ask some students to reproduce knowledge and other students to solve problems. It does not work well to say with a UBD curriculum that these students are only capable of memorizing the knowledge and we should ask these students to work with the big ideas. The assumption is that respectful curriculum assumes that all kids should work with those important big ideas and all tasks that do should be equally engaging, equally appealing, equally inviting.

It is important in a differentiated classroom, for lots of reasons, to audition students in a variety of settings. How do they learn here? With these students? Under these circumstances? With these materials?

Grant and Jay talk about fatal errors or misunderstandings with UBD. And one of the big misunderstandings with differentiated instruction is what we are trying to do is track inside the classroom instead of track outside the classroom. That really is not the case at all. The goal with differentiation is maximum movement of students among learning opportunities, among groups, among modes of expression.

As Jay and Grant have said, ongoing assessment is essential to understanding by design, to give evidence that the task matches the goals and that the student really has achieved understanding of those goals. With differentiation, it is also assessment to find out which students understand what and can do what so that we cannot put grades in a grade book but so that we can adjust instruction appropriately in the near term and the longer term.

In differentiation, we talk about responding to student readiness, student interests, and student learning profile. Those are three of the elements that students bring differences into the classroom with them when they come. When we talk about readiness differentiation, what we are looking at is trying to design materials, activities, products at levels of moderate challenge for each child. Our best understanding in education is that each of us learns when the task is a little too hard, and then when a teacher helps a build a ladder to achieve that. And once we have achieved it, we need to up the ante and make it a little bit too hard again.

So, what we are talking about here is rubrics that are a little too hard for individual kids, reading materials that are a little bit too hard for individual kids, questions that cause individual kids to wrestle, but they can achieve with appropriate wrestling.

When we look at student interests, we are looking at the fact that they bring different passions into the classroom with them. Interest is directly linked to motivation, and motivation to persistence and to achievement. So, if I can help students attach what I am trying to teach to their particular interests, or if I can help them develop new interests so that they want to pursue what I am teaching, the chances are pretty good that things will work better. Once again, with good, solid, rich, thought-provoking curriculum, it is much easier to find and install student interest than it is in covering trivial pursuit.

What we know from psychologists like Csikszentmihalyi is that when we find something we like, we lose ourselves in it. And when we lose ourselves in it, we learn, and the things merge with us and become much more satisfying, so that learning becomes more appealing to kids. Interest often, if we look at another misunderstanding with differentiation, looks like a frill. If you had time, you would make it interesting. But the truth is, as one educator said, every lesson plan should first be a motivational plan. What do I do to help the student care to invest in this and be willing to do the grappling that is necessary if in fact the task is a little too hard?

Learning profile also seems to matter from what we know. Kids come to us shaped by genetics, shaped by environment, for learning style. Some of us cannot work in a dark place. Some are much happier in a dark place. If I had to live in this room for very long, I would be institutionalized. My mood goes down with the wattage. But other people like to crawl in the mole hole and it works very nicely. Some of us need to touch things and manipulate them as we learn, and other people learn much better through the ear. Some of us can take it or leave it. So, learning style differs with kids.

Intelligence preferences seem to differ. Whether you look at the work of Howard Gardner or Robert Sternberg, what they tell is we seem to be wired for certain ways of learning. Culture can affect how we learn. Perversely, it is not the case that all people from one culture learn a certain way and all people from another culture learn a certain way, but there are some patterns that we need to attend to. And rather than saying, because she is from this culture, she should learn this way, what we need to know is, if we honored all cultures, we might offer these three choices or we might offer these five avenues, and then let students choose those that work best for them.

Similarly, gender can shape learning. There are male preferred learning patterns and female preferred learning patterns. Again, unfortunately, not all females learn the same way and not all males learn the same way, so we cannot say all the boys should do this and all the girls this. But if we understood the range, we could offer options that would be comfortable for whomever those fit.

Readiness has to do with achievability, interest with motivation, and learning profile with efficiency. So, the questions that we are asking in a differentiated classroom is, in what ways can I make the work challenging but achievable, motivating and efficient in the process. We can differentiate three classroom elements at least in response to student readiness, interests, and learning profile. Those three things are content, which is what we teach, or how students get access to what we teach.

A principle that Jay or Grant will mention to you later is that, whenever it is possible, our goal is to keep the content, the what, the same, but you may have to help kids get to it in different ways. So, even if you keep what you are teaching the same, how they get access to it may need to vary based on language proficiency, reading skills, mode of learning, and that kind of thing. We can differentiate activities and we can differentiate products or assessments that students work with us on. And we have many, many different instructional strategies that we can use to get there.

Why do we bother, as Grant asked, about UBD? A friend of mine who was in Taiwan recently encountered this piece of calligraphy, and her host in Taiwan explained it to her. It is several years old. It is a Confucian saying. And what is says is that human beings differ in their talents. To teach them, you have to start where they are. We have known that for a thousand years, and that is the reason.

This little fellow probably gives us a reason as well. A little seventh-grader in his course evaluation said: I like this class because there is something different going on all the time. In my others classes, it is like peanut butter for lunch every single day. This class, it is like my teacher really knows how to cook. It is like she runs a really good restaurant with a big menu and all.

And hopefully, of course, what he is reflecting is that in that menu is a way to help him be both challenged and successful, to be interested in much of what happens, and to learn in an efficient mode. And that is what we are trying to accomplish. It always works best with good curriculum in the foreground.

JAY MCTIGHE: Well, some of you know that there were two three-day pre-conference institutes held. One on understanding by design and one on differentiated instruction. I believe the cost was $469 per institute. So, you just saved $938 by sitting so smartly for the last half hour.

[Laughter]

JAY MCTIGHE: We want to give you a chance to interact a little bit. And if you are tired of sitting and you want to stand up with your group and interact do so. It is a three-minute pause to process some of the ideas that you have just heard.

[Pause]

JAY MCTIGHE: — stages of backward design that we have promoted in understanding be design. And a number of you know that we have a design template, a little graphic organizer, that people use when creating curriculum designs — units in particular — in this format. Now, this is a graphic representation of a one-page version. The template is really multi-page, particularly in electronic form. But one of the nice things about the one-page version and the template in general is that it provides a way of operationalizing backward design by thinking through each of the elements in the stages.

The template provides a tool, then, for looking at curriculum designs. You can review in this form. You can share it, as well as it becomes a design template. Ultimately, it's a way of thinking more so than filling in the boxes.

I am going to share with you an example of a unit design in this form and then turn it over to Carol to comment on some ways that we might more effectively deliver this to students. And think about the ways in which the content, the process, and the product are common and where they are appropriately differentiated.

What you see on the screen now is a design template for stage one of backward design, where we identify established goals -- for many people in the states at least, content standards or other identified goals — and then we break that down by identifying the big ideas we want students to come to understand, frame those around essential questions that promote inquiry and hopefully uncover the curriculum, and then identify the more specific and discrete knowledge and skills, the particular facts, concepts and skills to be learned.

Those of you familiar with the book Understanding By Design will recall that we have a running example through the book, with commentary by a teacher, and we have chosen this as one of our examples today. This is a summary. It is not the full-blown unit but a subset of the unit in stage one.

Contents standards from a national health education curriculum for a unit on nutrition, designed by the way for upper elementary or early middle school, the fifth- or sixth-grade level.

Understandings. One of the things that we want students to come to understand is that a balanced diet contributes to your health, both physical and mental, and that there are direct health implications, both good and bad, from your eating.

A couple of the essential questions the teacher designed includes those that are listed. Again, for the purpose of the audio listeners: What is healthful eating?

And lest you think this is just a fact question that can be given back, we all know that nutritionists today continue to argue about this and there are constant debates about what is a healthful diet.

The second question: What causes poor eating habits? Why do people, even with the knowledge of good nutrition, not always act on it? What is it about our culture that leads to so many nutritionally related health problems?

There are more specific facts and skills to be learned in the unit, and these connect to the content standards as well. That's stage one.

Stage two, in backward design, we are looking for evidence, given the goals of stage one. And we propose that we want to nest evidence by or within performance-type assessments that require students to apply, explain and use other of the facets of understanding. And we supplement the evidence from authentic application tasks by other evidence, which could be in the form of quizzes, tests, observations, looking at student work, and so on.

A summary of the ideas from the nutrition unit are posted. There are performance tasks in the units. One involves students creating a brochure for younger children, explaining to the younger children what healthful eating and balanced diets are all about.

And the second performance task comes at the end of the unit, where the students actually prepare a menu plan for three days, including meals and snacks. And they have to explain how their menu plan will be healthy but also tasty for fellow students to want to eat.

The teacher proposes collecting other evidence, however, including straightforward quizzes on some of the factual information that he is interested in as well as collecting evidence of their understanding of the kinds of health problems that might accrue from poor eating.

I want you to pay attention to the following, and this is going to come back a little pointedly in a moment. On the screen now is a more detailed description of one of the performance tasks, the first one, where the students have to prepare a brochure that they could use to teach younger children, in this case second-graders, about what healthful eating is.

The task is directed but still has some openness, which we will comment on in a moment. But what I wanted to show you is the bottom of the screen, where we think about the evidence needed and the criteria by which we will judge the extent to which students have actually acquired the understanding, knowledge, and skills, given the goals of stage one.

This is a beginning set of criteria, but looking at the brochure, whether they do it by cutting out pictures or they do it primarily in written form or even if their explanation is largely oral, we are going to look for certain things regardless of the form of the product: accuracy, appropriate elements of balanced diet, and effective explanation. And for whatever is produced, we are going to look at neatness and well-crafted elements, but those are really secondary to the important content criteria.

With clear goals in stage one and a range of assessment evidence in stage two, we then move to the teaching/learning plan, which, for the interests of our time and schedule, we are not going to go through all the particulars. I am going to turn it over to Carol now to make some comments about, given this content focus and the assessments in mind, what kind of appropriate differentiation might follow.

CAROL ANN TOMLINSON: As Jay suggested to you, a starting point for differentiation is what has been specified in stage one of the UBD work as what students should know, what they should understand and what they should be able to do. One thing that differentiation would probably add to the assessment evidence that is already present in this particular example on nutrition is to pre-assess students to find out what they know at the beginning rather than simply starting with the unit.

And so what we might do here for this is to give students a Frayer diagram as a pre-assessment before we ever begin the unit and ask them to let us know what their current definition is of nutrition, what information they can give us about it, what examples they might give us of good nutrition and what examples they might give us of poor nutrition. And then, to cover to some of the knowledge that is specified for what students should know for the unit, we might ask them just to name the food groups and give an example of each, and give us three important rules for good nutrition.

I do not think a teacher would want to grade this, but it would very, very revealing in the quantity of information that students have as they enter the unit. And likely what you would find in most classes is that some students are not even really particularly savvy with the word nutrition and other kids probably are little walking advertisements for grocery store labels.

So, I am going to make the assumption that in this class, when I did the pre-assessment as the teacher, I found the following, which would not be terribly different from other classes:

Four students already seem to have a reasonably elaborate understanding of the key ideas and a solid mastery of most of the key information as specified as central to the unit. If that is the case, they do not need to be taught the unit at a basic level. Seven students have very little knowledge and understanding related to the goals or they were unable to share their knowledge in this largely written format. Six students could explain the unit's understandings appropriately, but they did not really have the key knowledge. They had the big ideas kind of, but they did not have ammunition to fortify them. Nine students could explain the unit's understanding in a very basic and yet accurate way and they had some information about the larger ideas.

In addition to that, I am going to assume that this teacher knows she has three students who are not proficient in English, two who have learning disabilities that make it difficult to read and process information, two special ed students on inclusion IEP’s, one who has difficulty with emotion, and five identified as gifted. Now, if that sounds bizarre, that is like a lot of classrooms, and in fact it may be fairly mild compared to some of them.

Those things matter. And even a really good unit cannot address all those things with no modification. The better the unit, the better it will do, but those things need to be addressed. She knows, of course, also that her students like different things because human beings always do and she is trying hard to get to know what those interests are. And what she wants to do is use this pre-assessment as well as the chain of assessment that already exists in the UBD lesson to help her know who is where, who is learning what, and how to adapt her plans as she goes along.

So, let me give you a few thoughts about what might be done in this unit just in general. When students are asked to read the health text, the teacher can provide supported reading for students who have difficulty with texts. There is a health textbook involved here. So, for example, students might have reading buddies. There might be some portions of the text on tape so that students could hear them. There might be highlighted text, where the teacher has used a Magic Marker to highlight the essential parts of the chapter so that the students do not sink under the weight of all of that text. And the teacher might use graphic organizers, double-entry journals for example, to help kids become more meta-cognitively aware of how to analyze the text as they read.

When key vocabulary come up, such as the vocabulary listed under the "know," the teacher might provide key word lists with simple definitions for students who do not speak English very well so that they actually have the word and the definition and therefore can manage the ideas better. Certainly, the teacher could use small group instruction.

One of the steps in the lesson is to do a concept attainment lesson on what nutrition is. That is a really great thing to do for kids who do not already know what nutrition is, but it is a waste of time for students who can already explain the lesson plans we are getting ready to do. So a very simple modification is, what if we did the small group concept attainment lesson only with those students for whom the pre-assessment indicates the need for it while other students moved on ahead.

When a speaker comes in, which is the case in this unit, the teacher asks one of the students who simply cannot sit still and listen very well to actively videotape the lesson, which gets the kid up and moving rather than destroying the furniture.

In one place, the kids have to read and interpret food labels for some of their work. She can model briefly how you use food labels on jars and cans and then offer a mini-workshop for students who feel like they are not yet quite comfortable with what you do with that information. So, students who already have it or catch it quickly would not have to go through the whole process of laboriously analyzing the labels.

The teacher might give quizzes orally to students who need to have questions read to them, which would maximize their opportunity to show what they know, whereas writing might not always do that. And consistent assessment-based use of small group teaching would be very helpful to clear up misconceptions, to teach particular skills, to find alternative ways to work with tasks.

As Jay showed you a minute ago, one of the assessment tasks in the unit is for kids in the class, who are sixth-graders, to develop a brochure for second-graders so that the second-graders can learn more about nutrition. And the idea is that the sixth-graders would present the key understandings about nutrition in a format that second-graders could understand and would use cutout pictures of food as well as original drawings to show the difference between a balanced diet and an unhealthy one as well as to spotlight at least a couple of health problems that could occur as result of poor eating.

That is an undifferentiated version, and I want to show you something interesting about this that happened when I began to think about trying to differentiating it for this class. When I began looking at the differentiated version, my assumption was that the brochure is probably a good basic assignment for students who are having difficulty with the class. Trying to distill the information to two or three or four principles, pointing out a couple of health problems, doing it in language for second-graders, doing it in a brochure format, all of that would be a great task for kids who are having trouble in the classroom. The students in severe difficulty with language or reading, then I could assign them to work as a pair or even as a small group with me to do that.

What I find really often is, because in a classroom we simply cannot shoot at the top and hope everybody is going to join us without any scaffolding, many of our original activities shoot at low or low average performing students. And if you start looking at what you can do to modify them, many times your basic activity is going to be one that would challenge your kids who are in difficulty but not the kids who have some mastery of information.

So, if students have a basic understanding of the principles, then what I might ask them to do is to develop their brochure not for second-graders but for elementary students who are interested in becoming healthy middle-schoolers. That causes them to write for a more advanced audience but also to look at the specific purpose, what has to happen for nutrition in childhood in order to let early adolescence really become a healthy time.

Rather than cutouts and drawings, I might ask the students to develop icons, either with drawing or with the computer, that represent the meaning of the principles that they are using in their brochure.

Students who are particularly advanced in their knowledge about the vocabulary and principles of good readers and who are advanced in their ability to read and write might develop a brochure to be used in a pediatrician's office for young people between the ages of 10 and 16 and also for their parents. Which means, again, that you are going to have to write at a more advanced level for a more advanced audience. And to be real sure that what they do for those 10- to 16-year-olds is make the principles appealing and attractive rather than being a preachy turnoff, that change of audience is much more demanding.

My guess would be that in some classes, because of the health consciousness of some parents, there are some kids that are very nutrition savvy. And in that case, their brochure could be a specialty one for the pediatrician's office, for kids and parents who are already very nutrition savvy, telling them what the next level information is that they need rather than even that fairly advanced one.

If I wanted to tap into interests, I could very easily modify the brochure assignment simply to ask students to include in their brochures — and this could be for all students — some information that gives us guidance on how we would need to deal with nutrition to reach our own personal goals. So, for example, if you want to be a football player, what you have to know about nutrition. If you want to be a model, what would you have to know about nutrition. If you want to develop maximum brain power, what would you need to know. So that students would then be moving from general information to more specific interest based information.

In order to scaffold student's success throughout the unit, I could use teacher-guided groups — meaning students who do not speak English well — might work with the teacher in small groups to get a leg up on what is going on. I might allow students to work alone or with a partner, which could support language, could support students who work better collaboratively. I could provide kids data sheets that give them basic information that they would have difficulty abstracting from the text. We could have peer consultations so kids could coach one another on the quality of their work.

I can use reading or reference materials at different levels of complexity, including book-marking Web sites at different levels of complexity for students to use for research. I could give kids planning templates for their brochures, so kids who need the structure to be able to create the brochure would have that. I could do language bridges so that in every group where there is a student who does not speak English well there is another student who can help with the language. I can do teacher-taught groups to make sure that kids are clear on what they are doing before they actually execute it. I could do mini-workshops on particular skills that some students but not all students might need.

And a very fascinating thing to work with in a situation like this is sort of tinkering with the rubrics. I could have some things that all of us have to do, but it would be possible to have rubric strips so that not everybody gets the whole rubric but they get a couple of strips of it that are nearest their challenge level. And I could have both shared goals for the class and personal goals for individuals.

I said to some folks in the $465 workshop this week that when you get a set of curriculum that is this clearly focused and this rigorous, differentiating it is almost something you can do in your sleep. Because the clarity and the richness are already there, the tweaking process is really fairly simple.

JAY MCTIGHE: Now you know why Carol was teacher of the year in Virginia.

We wanted to give you an illustration of a solid design, enhanced through thoughtful differentiation. And we want to give you a chance to comment on what you heard before we move to our wrap-up. So, a three-minute pause. Again, if you want to stand and chat feel free to do that.

[Pause]

GRANT WIGGINS: — and we want to draw, as part one of our closure, draw some conclusions. And what we are going to show you, using a kind of traffic symbolism, is some recommendations that we would make about what differentiation is as it fits in the UBD framework in terms of the template.

In stage one, clearly the standards are the standards. The goals are the goals. While there are certainly cases with special needs students, English as a second language student, et cetera, where we want to modify some of the core goals, in general, we assume that the goals are uniform. They are standardized.

The implication for the UBD way of looking at it is that we would predict the understandings and the essential questions to be the same for all students. You can see, I think, how that works very nicely with what Carol presented. The differences that are done in the unit could be said in fact to make it possible for different students of different styles and interests to achieve related understanding. The essential question is one of the chief vehicles for setting up the possibility of differentiation, because a question that is a good one can be addressed by anyone at any level of expertise. That was, of course, Jerome Bruner's point in The Process of Education 50 years ago.

The essential questions form the kind of spine for a longitudinal developmental-differentiated curriculum. And we have given you a few examples of essential questions that people have used who have designed UBD units.

We have put the knowledge and skill in yellow as a way of saying clearly the goals and the state standards imply some knowledge and skill that follows directly. So, if the standards are standardized, then some of the knowledge and skill is going to follow along as well.

On the other hand, go slow. Yellow light here. There are going to be knowledge and skill that have to be quite idiosyncratic depending upon some of the subgroup work that students end up doing, or the different take on the project about the brochure that we use in the later part of the design. So there are additional knowledge and skill and perhaps even some of the core knowledge and skill that is going to be added or subtracted depending upon the goals and the assessments.

The needed evidence, the general consideration that follows from stage one, is required. Regardless of how young or old the student is, regardless of how experienced the student is, there are some aspects of the content standard on nutrition about which we want some evidence. And if critical thinking about one’s habits of diet and cooking and eating are central to the standard and the understanding and the question, then we want to see evidence from everyone about that.

On the other hand, we have a green light, as Carol made clear in her example. We can have varying particular tests or quizzes or guidelines for the brochure. We can also include a variety of options for students about the kind of performance modality that they might choose. We are not designing this primarily to meet the state standard in writing, so we need not require writing of all students in this particular example — unless of course we included the writing standard and so we would have to assess for it for all students in the design.

But, in general, we have a fair amount of flexibility in the assessment as long as we follow the test that links it back to what is in red. Even if the tasks and projects and forms of evidence differ, will each of them give equivalent evidence that relate back to the standard? So we have to self-test our design. And many of you who have done UBD work know that this self-test about the validity of the assessment is a crucial part of the work, because it is easy to deceive yourself, to say that because it is a hands-on, multiple intelligence is varied, it is an interesting, engaging task that relates to the understanding, that it provides adequate evidence.

Carol made reference to a point that is central to the issue of assessment that does not get enough attention. It is not enough to have valid evidence of the goal for some students. We are obligated to have valid evidence for all students. Since we are not assessing writing per se but understanding of nutrition, we have an obligation to differentiate the evidence. Otherwise, you have invalidity 101. The kids who cannot write look like they do not understand nutrition, but that would be an erroneous inference. So we always have to worry about the validity issue no matter how much we offer options and differentiation.

If we design a really cool, complex performance situation that has multiple roles and products and performances in it, and we have worried about the validity, now you have the great possibility for differentiation that would not be there in a robust design, as Carol alluded to earlier. One of the things that we all love about school complex performances that work well is that they honor that criterion that Carol alluded to at the outset. There has to be the right level of challenge and the right possibility of success.

Well, anybody who has every watched a group of kids put on a school play knows just how this can work exquisitely, where everybody has a crucial role to play, numerous wonderful performances and skills and understandings are being developed, but it is highly differentiated. The person doing the lights is very different from the person that is reading the lines out front.

On the other hand, we are probably going to have some uniformity to the rubrics. Notice that Carol made the exception by saying we might hold the student responsible for a lesser amount of the rubric or we might only show them three of the traits as opposed to the six for the other people, or we might only show them the middle bands as opposed to the whole range since we expect that they will be depressed by seeing the whole range, or whatever it is. Nonetheless, the rubric stays the same. Why? Because the rubric flows directly from the goals. What does evidence look like along a continuum for achieving such an understanding?

One of the things that is quite deficient in the United States, which they have done in Great Britain, is we do not have longitudinal rubrics for all subject matters. They do have them for the national curriculum in Great Britain. And it is a very powerful tool to use, because everybody fits on it, as must be the case with a good rubric. But you can customize those rubrics, mindful of the variety and range of student ability and prior experience that you have in the class that would come through the pre-assessment.

And finally, in the learning plan, of course, it is the greatest place to do the differentiation. And one of the things that we did to adjust our design was we added the letters "t" and "o" to the original acronym WHERE, because we felt that we were not sending the message strongly enough that differentiation was a central requirement for ensuring that a heterogeneous group of students could achieve an understanding.

JAY MCTIGHE: If someone asks you to summarize this session, tell them this. This does, we feel, visually represent the key ideas. We are going to end our session with what we hope you will find to be a provocative give-and-take around three frequently asked questions that Carol, Grant, and I receive. While we are not going to have open mikes, we do hope that you think about this actively and on your way out have a chance to chat about your responses.

Actually, let me show you all three of them and then we are going to go one at a time. How can we differentiate when we are supposed to teach the same content standards to all kids? How can I possibly do all this? We have too much content to cover and we have state tests that we are responsible for. How do we recognize individual differences in the grading system and report card practices that we are obliged to follow? Does that resonate with anyone?

I am going to turn this over. Each of us will take a lead on one question and others may chirp in, and we are going to take a couple of minutes each. So, I am going to turn this over to Carol.

CAROL ANN TOMLINSON: The issue of covering or uncovering content standards — hopefully, the uncovering approach — for all kids is problematic for us because we feel like we are hearing two contrary messages. Here is the state test. Here are the standards. Get all the kids there by May the 15th. Divide up the time. And in the end, if you get them all, there you are successful, they are successful. If you don't, you are not, they are not.

And then somebody on the other side of the room is saying to you, and for heaven's sake, differentiate the instruction on the way there but, by the way, the test will not be differentiated. And so we really do feel often caught in a vice and feel like we are hearing contrary messages. As is the case with all of these questions, there is a great deal that could be said. But certainly one simple way of looking at this is that differentiation and state standards are not at odds with one another. Because state standards are telling you what to teach, differentiation is telling you how to teach.

Once you have the curricular decision made about what you want to teach, as Grant said, most of the time you are not going to change the "what," the standards are not going to change greatly. What will change is how you get there. So, if some students need additional small-group instruction, different homework, an alternative way of making sense of the information, what you are trying to do really is to say what are all the ways I can maximize the chance that students can go the full distance rather than assuming that both the stuff and the vehicle have to be the same. So, at their heart, they really are not in opposition to one other, for that reason, if for no other. Although, again, if we had three hours, there is a lot more there we could say.

GRANT WIGGINS: The challenge of this frequently asked question goes to the heart of understanding by design. Namely, how do you get faculty to come to an understanding that something they believe to be an understanding is in fact a misunderstanding? The research is fairly clear on this, if you consult how people learn and the Marzano compendium of the meta-analysis of all the research on what works in instruction. Despite the fact that what many people fear, understandably, and think, teaching for understanding will improve your test scores. Test validity demands it and the nature of the standards demands it as well.

One way to make the point is to say it as follows. And when you say it this way, people usually go "huh?" and then you ask them to think about it and it is important. So that the person who says this, "I have too much content to cover to prepare for the test," and so your immediate response should be, "Well, let me see if I get this straight. You are going to teach worse to raise test scores?"

Coverage does not optimize test scores. That is what the research says. The belief that it does is equivalent to believing that the best way to prepare for your annual physical is to practice the physical. It is a confusion of cause and effect.

The state doctor comes in once a year to audit your health on a quick and dirty set of indicators like the doctor taking your physical. The best way to deal with your physical, mindful of the fact that you might indeed have genetic predispositions or high cholesterol or whatever it is, regardless of what you bring to the test, your best performance is a function of day-in, day-out health, fitness and wellness.

Should you know what the test is going to be? Of course, you should. You should treat the state test as a genre of writing and give kids practice in it. But to practice the test as the major approach to instruction and assessment is a self-defeating proposition. Because as soon as the items change, as soon as the test is re-normed, the scores will go down. There is a 40-year history of data that shows it. And there is plenty of national and international data to show that teaching for understanding is the greatest long-term way to improve test performance.

JAY MCTIGHE: We know that the blood sugar levels drop to dangerous lows at this time of the evening so we thought we would wrap up with something particularly provocative. And that is grading and report cards and how this honors or dishonors differentiation. I am going to take a crack at this, and I suspect that Grant and Carol will chime in before we wrap up at 7:00.

I am drawn to the work of Tom Guskey and Grant and others in this regard. And one little construct that is suggestive for a grading and reporting scheme that is both honest, fair and appropriately differentiated suggests that we do not have a single grade. So, in our ideal grading scheme we would propose three P’s for grading and reporting. And minimally two P’s at the secondary level, but I would push for all three.

The first is giving feedback whether it is in the form of letter grades or descriptive rubric scores or narrative reports or all of the above, but the focus would be on performance or achievement based on agreed upon goals. If the student has an IEP or has a differentiated set of goals, we ought to report their performance level. Pretending they are better than they are because they try hard is not going to help them. In the larger world beyond the classroom and often within the school system itself, we have seen problems. That is one P.

The second P honors and highlights process, including such things as work habits, effort, attitude. And we should honor and celebrate the students that put forth these attributes, habits like persistence and perseverance but we separate [inaudible].

The third P in this little schema honors and invites growth progress, improvement towards a goal, as Carol made note of earlier and as the British development of rubrics accommodate. A reporting system that shows honestly where students are but also can track and show their progress in ways that are celebrated, so that the success is not a single unitary measure but a multifaceted approach, we believe is [inaudible].

GRANT WIGGINS: … not only the students and the parents but with the teachers to have a clear understanding of where the second-grade student is against fourth-grade standards.

Central to the message that we have been giving you is that formative assessment gets far greater play in the design and execution. Indeed, the Zen paradox in understanding by design is that you plan and you are prepared to adjust because your plan makes it possible to adjust with greater clarity and insight, because you are clear on the goals and you get feedback as to whether you are achieving them.

If you are going to do a lot of formative assessment but you are going to grade them as if they were grade book scores to be averaged, you have committed both a measurement blunder and a moral blunder. The habit of giving a single letter grade to all student work just makes no sense. So, we have to think through a grading system that differentiates between formative information and standards-based performance reports, and make clear when we should use which.