Understanding by Design: Professional Development Workbook

Rating:
Summary: The Most Focused Book on Education that I've Read!
Review: I'm re-reading this fabulous resource as I start my fifth year of teaching since it keeps me focused on what I'm teaching and how to most appropriately assess how my students can apply their knowledge. The details and worksheets in this workbook help me put the book into practice day to day. Thanks Jay.

Rating:
Summary: Essential to Understanding Understanding (that's no typo)
Review: In order for us as educators to effectively assess our students, we must decipher how our students learn and understand.

That's essentially what McTighe and Wiggins help us do here. I also bought their textbook for a course I took in Assessment. It was fascinating.

This book, along with the textbook is very useful in Unit Planning and shows its readers how to effectively use the "backward design" technique. Teachers, I can only describe the technique as assessment the way WE think it should be.

This handbook is a step-by-step guide with tons of reproducibles.

Very useful find for planning the school year!

Rating:
Summary: Great resource
Review: One of my pet peeves is books on applied topics that talk about theory but can not bridge the theory to application. This handbook does a great job of assisting educators from going from the ideas of backward instructional design to implementing these ideas in actually developing educational plans.