Reflection on UbD Lesson

Reflection on UbD Lesson

Any difficulty that I had in creating lessons in the UbD format was centered around the question of what I wanted to students to know at the end of the lesson. This is the point of the UbD template. It exposes the sort of “backwards” way that many of us create our lessons, where we design activities and then see what students will get out of them, rather than first deciding what we want them to know. It is difficult to resist that temptation, but the UbD format takes me back to my days of student-teaching, where I learned that the first step in lesson planning is establishing clear objectives.

I like the format of UbD when my goals of the lesson are skill-centered rather than fact-centered. By creating goals connected to the development of skills like critical reading, cooperative learning, or critical thinking, it helps me focus my lesson. I can say to myself, “this content lends itself to an primary sources so I really want my class to work on synthesizing these two opposing viewpoints of the subject”.