Understanding by Design Book

As a rule, if I review a book, I read every word of the book. There have been a few exceptions (this brings the total up to 4, I believe...)

There was a lot of good content in this one. The concept is pretty solid, and I think most teachers are using Backward Design by now. I remember learning about it in my undergrad methods courses, but it wasn't nearly as in depth as it was here.

Basically, as the title implies - you start with what you want kids to know, and develop the curriculum from there. It's always nice to have a little direction, right?

This idea is generally accepted when it comes to teaching, best practice, educational theory, etc... unless we're talking about the standardized tests which mean so much these days. In that case, you have no idea what's going to be on the test and try your best to guess which standards are going to appear this year.

"But," I hear you arguing, "Isn't the test based on the standards? Why not just teach those?"

Ahhhh... you obviously haven't been in a classroom, or not a 7th grade social studies classroom - with standards from prehistory to present. Any fact, colony, religion, government, country, etc... from Africa, Asia, or Oceania... fair game. The state has all that to pull from, and I've still seen questions that weren't from our standards on there... for example, they might ask for the name of a country in the Western Hemisphere.

But I digress. The book is good. I didn't read every word, because a lot of it was very repetitive and used specific examples.

At any rate, new teachers are starting with Backward Design. Old Seasoned teachers are using Backward Design due to 20-40 years of trial and error: they know the direction they want to go because they've been there a thousand times.