UbD + Module's A&F = Just a complex way of saying "Indirect Teaching Method" ?

Professional performance require very specific personal management: everything is scripted, everything is rehearsed, everything is intentional, and everything is purposeful. Of course that doesn’t mean that the professional (in our case Educators) do not have the ability to be spontaneous and adaptive to progressive accidents. But even in the unforeseen events—a student completely misreading instructions or a student understanding and moving ahead too quickly—we should be able to recourse our performance to align with the situation at hand. At its core this is what UbD aims to get across to us.

Through the first dozen pages of our UbD readings I was able to recall several instances from mine own experience that alluded to this type of teaching instruction. UbD—Understanding by Design—is a teaching styling. It includes a multitude of levels of understanding from the perspective of the educator to their pupils, but it also requires the understanding of material from the perspective of the students to their teacher. What understanding outlines itself to be are the several states of learning a person goes through in order to create a habitual and significant skill within their own self. The short-end of this is that students understand what you aim to teach them when they don’t even remember that they were taught how to do something and start doing it as a force of habit.

A lot of what the UbD readings suggest to us as a good way to teach and good ways to assess seem to be what I (as a student) have done in college. My professors more often than not will ask a relatively unrelated question at the beginning of the class and will have us throw ideas out in as to what could be the solution or answer to said question. Through the course of the discussion, my professor will pivot what seem to be the “answer” but will never really reveal the “answer.” That professor will then move on with their lesson and will periodically return to the question they initially posed while also recalling our answers. They would do this to both 1) To see if those of us who did not initially call out those answers now saw where those answers may have formed or come from, and 2) To see if the “answers” we gave were really the “answers” that were discovered through the lessons we had that day. Sometimes we would get to the “point” of this series of indirect teaching and at other times we would be left with a main idea without the “point.”

But of course the entirety of the allocated classroom time is the “point.” What UbD says to me is “this is the very complex way to organize and construct Indirect Teaching Methods.” In the classrooms that I have had the chance to observe and teach in I have learned that Direct Teaching Methods rarely make their way into the classroom. While they have their place, more often than not we (as teachers) will utilize Indirect Teaching Methods.

Of course, the scenario I presented above does not follow the exact sequence of ITM, but for the most part it is a replica. The teacher will begin with a question, the students will explore and discover the components and answers to said question, the class will come back together to discuss the “answers” to said question, and the class ends with the teacher giving an overview of what the class just did along with the main idea and “point” of the lesson.

I had originally thought “Module A” and Module F” were going to be examples of UbD. But it turned out that they were simply elaborations on what UbD was and other mechanics of it. Once again, it turned out that they were pointing heavily to the ITM that seem to prevail most classrooms I have visited. They did, however, help me understand one component of the Teaching Methods in general (whether Direct or Indirect) and that was the essential question. In SED 406 I was always under the assumption that the only questions we (as teachers) should ask were the essential questions. These were the Objective/ABCD/Bloom’s Taxonomy Questions that were meant to make students constantly think on a higher plane. It turned out that we are allowed to ask Knowledge Questions (or run-of-the-mill-how-in-the-world-did-you-know-that questions) and the Essential Questions. They are a part of the lesson, but also a part of the real world. Not every question we ask has to be intellectually framed; in fact most of the time we just need to ask the real questions to assess and make sure our students are understanding us instead of just listening to us.