TPRS and Understading by Design

Let me think out loud a bit about Understanding by Design and how it meshes with TPRS/CI strategies.

What is Understanding by Design?

When I first started teaching, I spent 2+ years learning about and living a type of curriculum and unit organization strategy called "Understanding by Design" (Click here for a PDF overview of the topic from the creators of UbD).  Many of you have already heard of or used UbD.  Very basically, the idea of UbD is that you start to plan with what you want students to be able to accomplish at the end of the unit - begin with the end in mind, if you will.  Then, create assessments that would in the most pure form possible show to you whether students had mastered the goals that you had set for them.  Only then, when you have done those things, can you begin to plan the learning experiences that will bring them to be successful on your culminating assessment, and therefore demonstrate mastery of the goals you have initially set for your students.

When I learned about UbD, I thought it was really, really great.  I became pretty good (if I do say so myself) at using the template and strategies to plan thematic units of study for my kids.  There are lots of resources for this use, if you just Google "understanding by design foreign language."  There's even a great template out there that matches the ACTFL three-prong standards approach to help you plan a balance of learning activities in each of the modes.

What are potential issues when doing TPRS and CI as well as UbD

However, there are many things that I have heard, read, and seen in the use of TPRS that makes understanding by design a tricky thing to use.  First of all, there's a definite difference between merely "backwards planning" something and planning something using "Understanding by Design."  Backwards planning involves beginning with the end in mind, yes, but on a generally smaller scale.  For example, I have a novel that I want my kids to read.  I think it would make sense to read that novel, figure out what words they'll need to know when they read it, and then make sure that they know those words before we start to read the novel.  Many people, myself included, "backwards design" stories we tell in class to expose students to high-frequency structures or a certain pop-up grammar point we would like to make.

This is not necessarily UbD.  UbD asks, "What are the essential questions I want students to be able to answer?  What skills should they come away with?"  Many TPRS purists decide that we should just be inputting at all times.  Ben Slavic, whose website I love and have found to be immensely helpful, is among these. I am not in agreement.  As this blogger noted in her thoughts on lesson plans, even if they are not thematic, language at some point must serve a purpose -- there must be an intentionality to teaching different functions of language and since we are limited on time, we need to also be intentional with teaching words that give the most "bang for their buck."  This is part of fluency, is it not?  But, to me, it seems that only in a thematic unit can we discover the answer to an "essential question." And while I'm being honest...

I don't really buy into the whole "essential question" business.  Here is a list of World Language-specific questions generated by one of the "big names" is UbD.  They are broad, far-reaching.  I don't think that they do much other than make teachers feel great about their teaching.  The kinds of questions that they ask are usually ones that are either impossible to "teach," in my opinion, or impossible to assess.  It is extremely possible that I don't understand EQs because I'm just not that good of a teacher yet.  Maybe I fundamentally misunderstand EQs.  Other UbD unit plans I've seen from FL classrooms have grammar-based EQs: "How can the subjunctive be more important in languages beside English?" Ugh. That one was on the UbD website.  I don't feel comfortable with that being the essential thing I want a student to take away from the language acquisition experience.

My Solution

I want my kids to be able to order a sandwich, hold a conversation, and read a book in Spanish.  I want them to know a little something of the Spanish-speaking world (ideally, enough to spur them to study abroad and a enough to help them recognize that it's okay that not everyone does everything the way they do all the time).  But I don't know that assessing them on their growth as global citizens is the way I want to go.

Ultimately, I have decided to do the following:

• McTighe himself states the following is a way to kill a UbD initiative: "Standardize all UbD implementation.  Do not permit options/alternatives/different approaches to learning and using UbD.  Disregard the interests, talents, and readiness of individuals and teams." So I will FrankenPlan.
• Go with mini-units based around just 3 structures at a time and not stress about weaving them into a larger narrative.  For every three mini-units or so, I'll make sure to backwards plan a summative assessment. 
• No essential questions.  I'll plan a couple for the beginning of the year as part of my Course Goals.  That's something I can calendar in time (thanks Outlook!) to reflect on, include perhaps in the end-of-year project and survey, and reflect upon at year's end, without hurting myself and my kids trying to fit it into each mini-unit when it doesn't belong there.
• Units based around novels can, of course, be planned in the more traditional way with Essential Questions and a summative assessment at the end.