Saturday, 18 August 2012

Week 3 ' Module 9.8 - The Human Story


Analyse and assess one aspect of programming by UBD (Understanding by design)'.
Module 9.8 (Option – The Human Story)

If there is one thing that I have learnt this week in our riveting biology class, it has been that teaching is not in the slightest way easy.  Everything from mapping grids, to assessment criteria and matching up dot points to assessment outcomes takes time and requires a great deal of concentration.

The use of UBD allows us as teachers to actually have an idea of what we are doing and where we are going with it.  The use of UBD is designed as being backwards design and long term results.  Therefore within Module 9.8 we can start the topic to aim to answer the following focus question,

How did humans come to be, and how do we compare to other organisms?

This focus questions gives students an understanding of what to expect within the module but also to gather a grasp of what can be proposed later on down the track.  It also ties in well with the entire module and each individual focus dot point.  The idea of this will allow students to process their knowledge on the module by referring back to the original focus questions.

From this we can design by working backwards and create assessments, practicals and lessons which will benefit the students by giving them something to work from.

2 comments:

  1. great focus question to start off with thi unit.
    I truly believe that a good open ended question like this one you have presented will creat an environment where students will be curious about and would be excited and enthusiastic about learning the content.

    I hope this comment gets published!

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  2. it does sound like a good method, doesn't it. I particularly like the idea that everything gets taken back to the essential question(s) that students need to address. Because of this I think it's really important to have a good central question that students find interesting and are engaged by.

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