This year, our school is going to embark on a journey called "UbD" or Understanding by Design. This thing has been around in a while in America, but here in my country, it was implemented last year in the public schools. But since I am in a private school, it is only now that we are catching up with this UbD fever.
I already heard this UbD when I was still a practicumer in college 2 years ago, and I always thought that it is a sort of planning the lesson but you think of the assessment first. Well, to be frank, I always thought that it's only a different way of writing lesson plans.
So here is my school catching up the fever because the Department of Education directed that the schools follow this UbD way of thinking. But it comes with a price, you see. We the members of the faculty feel very cheated of our vacation because we need to spend it doing the UbD templates. And it is such a pain on the ass considering that we need to prepare those lesson plans and we need to implement it already this coming school year. I have always thought that curriculum planning takes years, and lesson planning takes time. But making the teachers rush their lesson plans for compliance is doing the teachers (and students) injustice. If the plan is faulty, then I'm very sure that the execution would also be faulty since the teacher doesn't know what the hell she is doing. And in the long run, the students would just become guinea pigs. Basically, we are doing the lesson plans in the dark. We are just hoping that even if the plan sucks, we would be able to pull off the execution right.
Yes, there have been seminars, but most of it didn't really help us at all. If it did, it only caused confusion and resentment among the faculty and the administration. We have this certain seminar in the school a couple of days ago, and we invited a speaker from a publishing house to help us tresh out this confusion. Turns out, this speaker have also attended UbD seminars in America with no less than the proponents of UbD themselves. And it was most enlightening, not only did we see the things that we are doing wrong (thanks to the lesson plan critiquing), but it also made us realize that crafting UbD templates and executing it is really just simple. And that simplicity made all the difference.
According to her, all lesson are done with A-Acquisition, M-Meaning-making and T-Transfer. Now, what puzzles me is that if I am going to look at a sample UbD learning guide, it only consists of the days and the things that you are going to do in those days.
Example:
Nutrition (Grade 6) Duration: 2 weeks
Day 1: Begin with an entry question (Can the foods you eat cause pimples?) to hook students into considering the effects of nutrition in their lives. (Making meaning)
Introduce key vocabulary terms and discuss relevant selections from the textbook. (Acquisition)
Day 2: Quiz on key vocabulary terms and selections from the book
Day 3: Students work independently to develop a three-day camp menu for younger children and offer them ideas for breaking bad eating habits
And so on and so forth. The speaker told us that that is the original UbD template. And we were like, "What the f**k?" because what we are doing with our templates is, if we are going to follow this thing strictly, wrong. What we did with our templates is this.
I. Introduction
II. Interaction
III. Integration
IV. Closure
V. Agreement
And I was like...are we a bunch of sado-masochists here? So I figured this was the f***ing reason why we are having a very hard time devicing our learning plans. We are deliberately making our lives harder. It got me thinking, where in the world did our administrators get their template? They said that it was from FAPE (Fund for Assistance to Private Education), and the speaker admitted that the FAPE template is actually more complicated than the original UbD template. I felt cheated. If we have an easier template, why did they opt to choose the more complicated route? One of my colleagues said that the FAPE template is designed for Catholic schools, but what makes the template so Catholic? What makes it more effective than the original? So we felt all the more cheated by our administrators, why is it that they only scheduled the seminar now? Why only now that some of us (myself included) are already through with our learning plans? They have the whole freaking school year last year to invite that speaker. And now, they only caused confusion among us, and resentment towards our admins.
Like our speaker said, "UbD entails us enjoying life, simplifying life," but in my school, it is surely not the case.
I already heard this UbD when I was still a practicumer in college 2 years ago, and I always thought that it is a sort of planning the lesson but you think of the assessment first. Well, to be frank, I always thought that it's only a different way of writing lesson plans.
 |
| I'm as skeptical as skeptical goes. |
So here is my school catching up the fever because the Department of Education directed that the schools follow this UbD way of thinking. But it comes with a price, you see. We the members of the faculty feel very cheated of our vacation because we need to spend it doing the UbD templates. And it is such a pain on the ass considering that we need to prepare those lesson plans and we need to implement it already this coming school year. I have always thought that curriculum planning takes years, and lesson planning takes time. But making the teachers rush their lesson plans for compliance is doing the teachers (and students) injustice. If the plan is faulty, then I'm very sure that the execution would also be faulty since the teacher doesn't know what the hell she is doing. And in the long run, the students would just become guinea pigs. Basically, we are doing the lesson plans in the dark. We are just hoping that even if the plan sucks, we would be able to pull off the execution right.
 |
| My students and I are all guinea pigs. |
According to her, all lesson are done with A-Acquisition, M-Meaning-making and T-Transfer. Now, what puzzles me is that if I am going to look at a sample UbD learning guide, it only consists of the days and the things that you are going to do in those days.
Example:
Nutrition (Grade 6) Duration: 2 weeks
Day 1: Begin with an entry question (Can the foods you eat cause pimples?) to hook students into considering the effects of nutrition in their lives. (Making meaning)
Introduce key vocabulary terms and discuss relevant selections from the textbook. (Acquisition)
Day 2: Quiz on key vocabulary terms and selections from the book
Day 3: Students work independently to develop a three-day camp menu for younger children and offer them ideas for breaking bad eating habits
And so on and so forth. The speaker told us that that is the original UbD template. And we were like, "What the f**k?" because what we are doing with our templates is, if we are going to follow this thing strictly, wrong. What we did with our templates is this.
I. Introduction
II. Interaction
III. Integration
IV. Closure
V. Agreement
And I was like...are we a bunch of sado-masochists here? So I figured this was the f***ing reason why we are having a very hard time devicing our learning plans. We are deliberately making our lives harder. It got me thinking, where in the world did our administrators get their template? They said that it was from FAPE (Fund for Assistance to Private Education), and the speaker admitted that the FAPE template is actually more complicated than the original UbD template. I felt cheated. If we have an easier template, why did they opt to choose the more complicated route? One of my colleagues said that the FAPE template is designed for Catholic schools, but what makes the template so Catholic? What makes it more effective than the original? So we felt all the more cheated by our administrators, why is it that they only scheduled the seminar now? Why only now that some of us (myself included) are already through with our learning plans? They have the whole freaking school year last year to invite that speaker. And now, they only caused confusion among us, and resentment towards our admins.
 |
| We're this close to confronting the higher - ups. |
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