Implementing Understanding by Design in the Classroom 

• Erin Zaffini
• Posted 5/20/25
• 0 comments

A new school year is also a time to reflect upon the progress (or lack of progress) in our teaching during the previous year. Did your students learn what you taught them in accordance with the national standards? How do you know? Do they retain what they learn in class from year-to-year, or do you find yourself re-teaching a number of concepts? Although these questions might be difficult to honestly address within oneself, they are a necessary component to future curriculum and unit planning. 

Teachers who utilize UbD strive to teach for student understanding, where understanding is defined as students’ ability to make connections between content areas and transfer knowledge in realistic settings. Students’ lack of understanding could be due to the nature of our unit, or to our overall curricular planning. Simply having engaging “hands-on” activities in the general music class does not mean that students are actually learning for understanding, nor does “covering” everything in a high school music textbook from beginning to end. Rather than approaching unit planning by asking, “what activities will the students do today,” Wiggins and McTighe (2005) suggest asking other questions, such as “what is most important for students to know?” and “what is the most appropriate evidence for students to demonstrate their understanding?” 

Thinking and planning our curriculum backwards in the UbD manner helps teachers decide which understandings are ultimately sought, and allows them to teach, in depth, what they deem most important, rather than simply covering numerous concepts every year. Backwards design involves the following steps: (1) identify desired results, (2) determine acceptable authentic evidence, and (3) plan appropriate learning experiences and instruction. 

It should be noted that the second step involves planning various forms of authentic assessments for students. This can be more complicated for some of us, particularly if we tend to favor worksheets and written tests in our classroom. Although these types of assessments do have a place in our classrooms, they are not necessarily authentic or appropriate for each standard. For example, rather than giving a multiple choice quiz to my sixth grade students about the history of jazz music and famous jazz musicians, I assigned each student a jazz musician to research and later impersonate in a wax museum put on for the rest of the school. Authentic assessments help our students remain engaged in the content, as well as retain the understandings that are sought. 

In addition to this general order of planning, UbD also provides the following useful lesson template to help guide our planning: 

Although this design approach seems fairly straightforward, it can be difficult to put into action. It requires a realigned view of how to plan and implement our teaching. It also requires that we sift through all of the information about any given concept in order to prioritize what is most important for our students to know. For those of us teaching at the elementary level, where time with students is already limited, implementing UbD requires time commitment and faith in the idea that teaching fewer concepts in depth during one school year is more effective than teaching many. 

As I have previously noted, this brief article barely touches upon all the elements employed in UbD, however, it can serve as a good starting point. Since using this backwards design approach, I have been able to reduce the amount of time spent reviewing previous concepts with students. I have also been able to teach for greater depth and understanding in both the elementary and middle school grades. Although I have no personal experiences using this approach at the high school level, I am aware of colleagues who had had success using it in their classes, and I will begin to implement it at the college level. 

Wiggins, G. P., & McTighe, J. (2005). Understanding by design. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.