Understanding by Design

Understanding by Design, often called backward design, is a curriculum planning framework developed by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe and published in 1998. It reverses the usual order of lesson planning: rather than starting from a textbook or a sequence of activities, a teacher first identifies the understanding students should walk away with and the essential questions that frame it, then decides how that understanding will be assessed, and only then designs the specific learning activities that will get students there. The framework's central test of real understanding is transfer, whether a student can apply what was learned to an unfamiliar situation, rather than merely reproduce it on a test resembling the ones practiced in class. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/