Essential Questions To Guide Your Curriculum Mapping And Lesson Design

by Grant Wiggins

How teachers plan – I think this is one of the more interesting ‘black boxes’ in education. There are few studies of it, yet it is clearly one of the most vital elements of the enterprise. Winging it is sometimes fun, but it’s a bad way to run a family, a business, or a classroom.

Marzano reports that a “guaranteed and viable curriculum” is the key factor in academic achievement in schools, regardless of how flexible plans have to be. As General Eisenhower said, “In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.”

How do you plan? How often is the textbook the source of the plan? How often is district curriculum referenced? How detailed are your plans? Do you design units and then lessons or just a string of lessons? How should you plan for optimal preparation and good results? What’s the role of templates and checklists in such planning? How much of the planning process should be mandated or at least recommended vs. left up to the individual teacher? (Leaders may wish to begin a staff meeting with these questions.) These are surprisingly difficult questions to answer, once you spend years looking at how people do (and don’t) plan, as we have via Understanding by Design. (A reader tipped me off to this instructive post on the topic by a math teacher. We also have developed a Survey on Planning – let me know if you want to participate in the online version.)

Typical plans focus too much on fragmented day-to-day lessons and activities on discrete topics instead of deriving coherent plans ‘backward’ from long-term performance, leading to excessive ‘coverage’; many plans focus far too much on what the teacher and students will be doing instead of mapping out a plan for causing specific results; a surprising number of plans do not make student engagement a central design consideration; many plans have no Plan B ready when Plan A doesn’t work. And most teachers still do not plan mindful of key student transfer deficits, misconceptions, and predictable rough spots related to student diversity.

It was for all these reasons and more that Jay McTighe and I wrote Understanding by Design 14 years ago. We clearly struck a chord. The book is in its 2^nd edition, over a million copies have been sold and used in countries all over the world, and over 150 schools of education use the book to train teachers in unit writing. Over the years, countless people have thanked us for helping them become more thoughtful and disciplined in their planning.

The Misconception

However, never did Jay and I intend for our template to be a mandatory act of pointless drudgery, a required piece of busywork required by thoughtless supervisors. Never did Jay and I intend people to fixate on filling in boxes. Never did Jay and I advocate using the UbD Unit Template as a lesson planner. Indeed, in our latest books on unit planning we stress this point in an entire module. You can download an excerpt here: Mod O – on lesson plans (excerpt).

Rather, as with any tool, we hoped that people would use our template as a helpful aid, as a mental check. The idea of a good checklist is what’s key. Atul Gawande has written extensively on how the “pre-flight” checklist in medicine, modeled on the one used in every airplane cockpit, has saved lives. Here is an article on its power to save lives.

An instructional planning template can save intellectual lives. By having to think of the big ideas; by focusing on transfer as a goal; by worrying about whether goals and assessments align, the Template keeps key design questions front and center that tend to get lost in typical planning, where teachers too easily think about content to be covered instead of minds to be engaged.

Years ago, in working with college professors as part of Lee Shulman’s Scholarship of Teaching program, a History Professor from Notre Dame said: I can’t use a template. It’s so, so, so – schoolish! I replied: Do you like the planning questions in the boxes? Yes, he said. Then, ignore the template and consider the questions, I said. Oh, he said, I can do THAT. Precisely.

Here are the current template elements framed as questions, for idea-generation and double-checking one’s draft plan:

14 Questions To Guide Your Curriculum Mapping And Lesson Design

What content standards and program- or mission-related goal(s) will this unit address?
What kinds of long-term, independent accomplishments are desired (transfer goals)?
What thought-provoking questions will foster inquiry, meaning-making, and transfer?
What specifically do you want students to understand? What important ideas do you want them to grasp? What inferences should they make? What misconceptions are predictable and will need overcoming?
What facts and basic concepts should students know and be able to recall?
What discrete skills and processes should be able to use?
What criteria will be used in each assessment to evaluate attainment of the desired results?
What assessments will provide valid evidence of transfer and understanding (and other Stage 1 goals)?
What other evidence will you collect to determine whether Stage 1 goals were achieved?
Are all three types of goals (acquisition, meaning, and transfer) addressed in the learning plan?
How will you pre-assess and formatively assess? How will you adjust, if needed (as suggested by feedback)?
Does the learning plan reflect principles of learning and best practices?
Have you considered how to fully engage everyone and hold their interest throughout?
Is there tight alignment across all three stages?

We have hardly treated our own Template as a sacred untouchable icon. We have changed it 4 different times over the past 14 years, and we have provided examples in which various features of the Template were highlighted or left out. In short, we had zero intent of putting teachers in a mental and physical planning straitjacket. Alas, some mandate-minded and unimaginative supervisors are still fitting all their teachers for one.

So, I am not unhappy that Chicago schools recently decided to stop mandating a template for planning. The use of planning tools should involve some freedom, based not only on personal planning style and preferences but track record as a teacher-planner. On the other hand, allowing teachers to plan any old way just doesn’t work out well. The middle ground is to ensure that key design questions are considered in any specific planner.

In retrospect, though, I think a mistake we made was to present one template instead of two or three. That would have perhaps better made the point that, while there needs to be a protocol and checklist to ensure that easily-overlooked elements are considered, there are none the less different yet acceptable ways of accomplishing this.

In that spirit, I offer today variations on our current Template, and hundreds of unit and lesson templates, found in a quick Google search.

Happy Planning!

14 Questions To Guide Your Curriculum Mapping And Lesson Design originally appeared on Grant’s personal blog; image attribution flickr user statefarm

Essential Questions To Guide Your Curriculum Mapping And Lesson Design

About The Author

Grant Wiggins